I tried my second attempt at doing a mosaic on the Heart & Soul Nebula last night. I got all my frames
but here’s what happens:
On the first frame, SGP slews to the target and performs a succesfull plate solve. Then it will stop because PHD never selected another guide star. And before it aborts, I cancel the “Dismiss” and that pauses the sequence. I then go in to PHD2 (Dev Build 11) and re-select the guide star. Imaging commences for that frame.
The same thing happens on all suseqent mosaic frames. After a succesful Plate Solve, the guider won’t resume as the guide star from the previously manually selected guide star has moved. I then select another and the imaging continues. I took 6 X 2 Mosaic Panels this way.
Is there any way that when SGP’s Plates Solves are successfuly completed on each panel, that the next guide star is selected automatically? In PHD I used the hot key combination Alt/S (for PHD2 to auto select a guide star), but nothing happens. Otherwise it looks as if I have to pause the sequence after the Plate Solve routine, manually re-select a guide star, then carry on with the sequence again.
It appears that I’m almost there, I got all my panels but had to manually re-select a guide star before starting to image each of the next panels.
SGP already tells PhD to select a new star when targets change. It has to or features like multi targets and mosaics would be pretty worthless.
Sounds like PhD isn’t selecting a star for whatever reason. We’d need the SGP and PhD logs to see what is happening. Also make sure you’re using the latest Phd2 and SGP.
I quickly checked the attached SGP log and now I remember getting this
warning at setup time:
{“Event”:“Alert”,“Timestamp”:1471670732.074,“Host”:“HP8470”,“Inst”:1,“Msg”:“
Calibration was too far from equator, recalibration is
needed.”,“Type”:“warning”} (from log)
My calibration star was too high. I chose it because it was near to my
target of the Heart and Soul nebulae which is very high (+60°). I thought it
might throw
out my guiding a tad but that would be all. Maybe it does affect the
automatic finding of the guide star?
Randy
Please see my next post on my attempted 6 panel Mosaic of the Heart & Soul nebulae. Nothing could be joined and gaps show up due to no overlaps.
Not 100% sure what “holding” means, but the MFW code is fairly mature at this point and has not changed in a good long while. Lots of folks creating good mosaics with no issues. If the scale was wrong when the boxes were drawn, the overlap setting is fairly meaningless. Scale error is also capable of producing a situation where everything lines up correctly, but there are gaps between tiles.
Yes, this was my problem Jared and thank you ever so much for explaining the angle of the camera in the Framing and Mosaic Wizard versus the physical orientation/angle of the camera on the dovetail of the mount. It all makes sense now and I am getting successful results thanks to your explanation.