I have a question about SGP’s interface with PHD2. I know that in SGP you can force PHD2 to recalibrate for each target (PHD2’s documentation and forums seem to discourage this saying that once properly calibrated you should be able to reuse that calibration multiple times?).
Is there anyway to force or even schedule PHD2 to run the guiding assistant wizard or to have it re-select a guide star?
I’ve found the guiding assistant pretty useful, while I doubt it’s currently possible it would be cool if you could initiate the wizard, set the time for it to run (normally 2 minutes) then have it accept the new values and resume guiding.
Again with the doubt category but occasionally I’ve noticed that PHD2 will automatically select a guide star that’s too close to the edge of the FOV. Probably something PHD2 needs to implement but it would be nice if they would report back some kind of value that represents how close the guidestar is to the edge of the FOV. If it’s inside some threashold it would be nice to have it try autoselecting again until the guidestar selected is close to the center of the FOV.
Call it random thoughts from a guy who hasn’t seen clear sky’s for months. (rain rain rain)
PHD2 does not currently have the capability for an imaging app like SGP to control running the guiding assistant. Although we could conceivably add this capability to PHD2, the intent of the G.A is to be run interactively as a diagnostic tool to evaluate things like your polar alignment drift or your mount’s periodic error. The main exception to this is the G.A.'s min motion setting recommendation which can change as sky conditions change. Bruce and I (PHD2 developers) are currently working on making the min-motion setting in PHD2 more automatic. Once this feature is available, there will be much less need to run the Guiding Assistant from night to night for tuning the min-motion setting.
PHD2 chose a star too close to the edge.
Did the star selection near the edge of the FOV cause some kind of problem? If so what was the problem? If you could provide more information and post your logs in the PHD2 forum from a session where the incident occurred we’d be glad to look into it.
Thanks for the reply! As to suggestion 1 once that change is made it makes the suggestion a moot point. However I did want to point out the automation and alerting aspects with SGP in this instance. For example, in order for the suggestion to be viable you’d have to expose the polar alignment error to SGP. I would then setup what I consider to be my acceptable margins for this value and my equipment. Outside those bounds SGP errors and alerts, inside then set PHD2 to the recommended settings and “go”. However glad to hear about the new feature, sounds like a better way to handle to me.
Suggestion 2 - I haven’t had this happen since I replaced my guider setup. When I had the Orion magnificent mini setup I had a couple times where I’d get a guide star right on the edge of the FOV and my Atlas didn’t keep up (this was prior to when I had it hypertuned). However I’ve since replaced with a Stellarvue 60mm and ZWO291mono.
That said, maybe the better way to approach it would be to adjust my settings around the star parameters (I’m not near my laptop and don’t recall off my head what the settings are named).
I’m just now to the point along the learning curve where I’ve been starting to automate more and step away from my setup a little here and there. Currently working on recovery mode etc. and that’s where the thought la popped out of my head from
(rain rain rain)
However glad to hear about the new feature, sounds like a better way to handle to me.