<IHi guys,
Had a really good night on Wednesday, so identical gear left ready to go for a session on Thursday night. Connected all - WIlliam Optics GT81, ZWO120mc guide cam, ZWO183mm mono cooled cam, ZWO EFW filter wheel, Losmandy GM8 mount, lakeside focuser. All connected in Windows 10 laptop.
I was a over confident (why??) , and the forecast was really clear, so when I saw the first image come in I just left things running and retired for the night. On analysing the files though, I realised that I had continuous movements between all of the 300 second images.
I looked back and realised that there was no PHD log for the period at all, and looking at the SGP log I can see that there are lots of line like:
So I’m guessing PHD2 was not running, or running incorrectly.
Obviously next time out I will observe a lot more carefully and check for anthing obvious going wrong, but I’m surprised that SGP could continue taking images for five hours with guiding apparantly not working.>
Aprox time of issue: <Night of 23/24 September 21, 1bout 9PM onwards>
Link to Logs
Useful Info
OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro Ver: 3.1.0.479 .NET: 4.8
Dave,
There are some useful utilities around that might help you. There is “SGP Log Viewer” (Google search will find it) which looks through your SGPro log file and summarises information in a graphical format which then allows you to home in on regions of the log file. I used that and quickly saw that autoguiding had been running OK until 22:52:22 approximately, when PHD2 started reporting it had stopped - this was after finishing the third SII image, while waiting to start exposing for the fourth. I couldn’t see anything in the log file to indicate why it happened, but someone more attuned to the various messages in the log file might be able to glean something more. It would seem that PHD2 did no more guiding after that time.
So this brings me neatly to the next utility, “PHD2 Log Viewer” which can be found here PHD2 Log Viewer - PHD2 Guide Log viewing tool (adgsoftware.com). This allows you to look at log files from PHD2 and also renders information graphically to a degree, but that may give you more information on why PHD2 decided to throw in the towel. It can be things like slightly faulty USB connections causing a time-out, but the PHD2 log file is your best bet for that.
There is then the Windows Event Viewer, but that would have to be a last resort as the log files from SGPro and PHD2 are beacons of clarity compared to that, but if it is a Windows error of some kind, that’s where it would be reported.
Terry,
Thank you, that’s most helpful. I had PHD log viewer already, but not the SGP log viewer. Going to spend some time working out how it works now, there’s certainly a lot to look at.
Since the problem session I have been out three times, and each time things have worked OK, so hopefully it was a one off issue.