Paramount nudge function and centering not working

Hi,

Just installed SGP and the framing&mozaiek wizard to our remote setup.
Got everything working up till two things,

  1. the nudge function buttons for the telescope stay’s gray and does not work, nudge rates can be adjusted. not a big issue but maybe related to the second issue.

  2. Slew to commands and platesolving work correct, using astrometry.net for solving.
    When using the center function when the object is far away, after the platesolve the telescope slews towards the object and tries another center, but here is where it goes wrong. the command to go the last bit to come within the 50pix accuracy does not work, the scope does not move.
    Same as the center here function on a solved image in the framing wizard,a new taken image gets solved command to slew goes to mount and new image gets solved and mound has not moved. resulting in platesolve failed.

I cannot find was is causing this. is it related to astrometry.net and centring issues or maybe ascom driver issues due to the nudge function also not working?

Our setup:
Paramount ME controlled by thesky.
SGP telescope connection: thesky controlled telscope.

Thanks
Michael van Doorn

The Paramount ASCOM driver doesn’t expose the function we need to nudge the mount so we have to disable it.

Auto center has some issues when using Astrometry.net. I would recommend using Elbrus or Pinpoint for the time being. I believe we have the auto center issues addressed in an unreleased version of SGP which will be coming soon.

Thanks,
Jared

I was not aware of Auto Center issue with Astronomy.net. I have not seen this myself.

What does it do when this issue happens so I can look for it in my setup?

Does this issue apply only to Paramount mounts or just TheSkyX?

Thanks,
Peter

Thank you very much, so i don’t have to worry about something went wrong because the nudge doesn’t work.
.
About the autocenter: When autocentering, a image is taken, image gets solved, offset is calculated end mount is slewed, another image is taken, image gets solved to find out it has not moved. no matter how many tries the mount wont move.
Same with the center here in the framing wizard.
But it seems only happening when the target is already in the frame. when centering to a target far outside the frame the same sequence applies but the large slew is successful. maybe a skyX setting? small slews are not accepted or something?
I will give Elbrus a try ,

Thanks

Michael, I use the Jog controls in TSX. You can set a precise value in minutes, which is very useful. With the accuracy of these mounts it is possible to return to exactly the same spot with a press of the opposite arrow.

Thanks Buzz,
Yes indeed that works great.

Installed elbrus, and dec is moving now and centring but RA does not move. no matter how many tries.

Oke know al little bit more now,
Actually SGP was centering correct all the time, what goes wrong is the syncing to thesky.
the sky does not sync to the platesolved image, but i have unchecked the inhibit sync in the ascom driver.
So it centers until thesky is in its model and stops moving, resulting in a platesove failure in SGP.
I thought this was addressed in the 2.4 update? or maybe something else is going wrong?

I noticed theskyX was outdated, after the update it synced perfectly.
So problem solved, thanks

So, are you getting precise slew and centers with ‘inhibit sync’ enabled in the TSX ASCOM driver?

No, i have the inhibit sync unchecked/unabled in the driver, otherwise it should not be able to sync i guess.

I have the same issues as above when demo the software. I installed Pinpoint but the plates fail on nearly all the images so centering is non functional.

THE NUDGING controls are dimmed out.

Curiously TSX Image Link always works on the same images.

Any help
Would be appreciated .

@cardiofuse

Please see here to get us the stuff we need to help you troubleshoot:

This is probably because the SkyX ASCOM driver does not expose these. That said, SGPro provides enough functionality that these should almost never need to be used during the sequence run.

That is good to know. I didn’t see anythingin the help file but mount specific characteristics should be noted. I usually try to exhaustively read the forum if anything for a learning tool. Thank you, it’s a marvelous program. I switched to Platesolve2 and that seemed to solve my issues.

For info I have recently branched into mosaics with SGP, PinPoint and a Paramount MX. Using the new ‘offset’ sync command in the telescope tab, it has been centering within a few pixels in one iteration. It has done a LRGBHa 5-panel mosaic over several nights without issue.
With the current version 2.5.2.7, you need to tell the telescope to use ‘offset’ as the sync method (again) after you have ‘connected’ the telescope. I’m confident that this will be made permanent in the equipment profile in a future release.