I have installed SGP on a new, faster laptop and everything is working nominally. I have calibrated PHD2 with the SX AO unit (active optics). Last night two unexpected events happened.
1 - there were some very long delays waiting for the guider to ‘resume’; timed at 2138 and again at 2154pm. during this time I had made minor changes to PHD2 but they were minor (affecting the aggression factors) and the guiding was improved - possible the best yet. Despite this, SGP reported that it was (still) waiting for the guider. Is there any clue in the sg_logfile_20180927190147.zip (138.7 KB)
attached log file? At one stage it aborted the sequence and I have no idea why.
2 - I did have SGP set to dither every three frames but as I watched the end of frame process, my impression was that it was dithering after every frame.
Apart from that, the time for ‘analysing stars’ was reduced to about 1 sec on the new laptop.
I forgot to log and therefore mention in the above:
until now my between target slews have been fine; new targets take about 2 or 3 near target slews to get within the 75 pixels arbitrarilyy listed. Yesterday I made a slight reduction to the scope’s slew speed to hopefully reduce the high speed during corrective adjustments (which are often very near target). Last night (see the log referred to above) I watched the slews as they seemed to be quite random - changing the pixel errors often worse than previous, and hence ‘missed’ the target.
Has anyone got any idea about this? It doesn’t seem to make sense; I could increase the 75 pixels but that has always been fine before. It also seems a shame to increase the scope’s speed when I want it slower.
Hi Lawrence, I can comment on this part.
The long delay is due to PHD2 waiting for the mount bump to complete. This is taking a long time because the PHD2 setting Mount bump steps is a bit too low. If you increase that setting it should fix the problem. If you have it set to the default value of 1, try increasing it to 2 or 3. You can then back it off to a lower value if your mount bumps are too “spiky”. FWIW I use a value of 1.75 with my SX AO. (The setting is described in the PHD2 help file.)