How to report issues or ask for help

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Hi folks,

In order to expedite your requests for help, we politely ask that, before posting, you take a look through the help file to see if it answers your question. One is installed with every copy of SGPro and has search functionality. Finally take a look through the forum (using forum search) to see if others have experienced a similar problem.

If you still can’t figure out how to resolve your issue, by all means, ask for help. Here’s how:

As a general rule, when requesting help:

  • Create a new topic and file it under the category that best describes your issue. If you are having plate solve issues, use the “Plate Solve” category… if your category does not exist use the generic “Sequence Generator” category
  • In your post, include:
    • The general time of the incident… even giving us a range of an hour or so can save lots of time. Something like, “between 21:00 and 22:00” would be great.
    • A link to a log file showing the incident (failure). Help->Open Log File (for the current run). For a previous run, Help->Open Log Folder (SGPro saves logs for 2 weeks). This forum does not allow for attachment of large files so you will be responsible for hosting your own files (www.dropbox.com is a great free service to take advantage of for this task). Please do not attempt to send snippets or portions of the log file! The only exception to this is if a message repeats itself hundreds or thousands of times… you can remove that part and make a note…
  • The SGF (sequence) file you were using when the incident occurred (if applicable)
  • If you are experiencing problems with auto focus, we will likely need “Auto Focus Packs” uploaded to somewhere like Dropbox to help. You can enable AFPacks here: http://www.mainsequencesoftware.com/Content/SGPHelp/AutoFocus.html
  • If you are having issues with plate solving, please be sure to include a link to an image that you are having trouble with (for SGPro camera plate solve images, you can right click the image and save it to disk).
  • A detailed description of the problem you are having (please try to identify the time of the incident). A detailed description, means providing a series of steps that fail for you.

Example:

  1. Open the sequence (the sgf you provided)
  2. Click on target settings for the “M42” target
  3. On the plate solve tools, open the file names"my.fits"
  4. Click “Solve” and notice how it fails

Note: PLEASE DO NOT CUT AND PASTE YOUR LOGS INTO YOUR MESSAGE!

This may seem like a lot to ask for, but I can almost guarantee you it will take less time than 20 questions over the forum.

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