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Problem in the workflow with Ekos

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Hi there,
I am a complete beginner in astrophotography and I have been reading a lot about the topic.
I have now a setup consisting of an iExos 100 mount, a modded canon 60d with a 300mm lens mounted on a ball head on the mount, and a raspberry pi 4 running astroberry to control the whole thing.



Everything is connecting fine. I can start Ekos, connect to the mount and DSLR, and take some snapshots.

For now, I completely skip the polar alignment and I roughly position my mount towards Polaris. It is probably not well aligned, the axis where the hole for polar alignment is points roughly to Polaris.

I then loosen the ball head and point my camera roughly to a region in the sky that interests me, let's say andromeda.

Trying to plate solve and sync when Ktars thinks the camera is looking at Polaris ends up timing out (I downloaded all recommended and necessary fits). So I help it a bit by first syncing manually to Andromeda.
I previously pointed the camera roughly towards Andromeda so plate solving is successful and it syncs to the real region where the cam is looking.

Now is when the problems start. When I want to send the mount to a different object in the sky, it seems to go in a completely wrong direction, sometimes even the opposite. The error is so large it can't be explained by a not very precise polar alignment alone.

Did I miss a crucial step when setting up the mount? Does the Parking/Unparking play a role in this (is parking like homing the motors of the mount?)
Or is it because of the ball head that can give the camera a random direction relative to the mount?
3 years 6 months ago #59610
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Welcome to the joys (and heartache) that is astro photography! In your case, you would want to align the camera and the mount at the same time, and then leave the ball head as is. Move only the mount controls, and never the ball head after alignment. The way you describe it, the mount and the software still think they are pointed at Polaris, even though the camera is somewhere else.
3 years 6 months ago #59621

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What is the difference between aligning the camera to Polaris at the beginning, or syncing the camera position later using plate solving? That is the point I am not understanding.
After I sync, Kstars displays where it thinks the camera is pointing at and that is correct.

Does GoTo only work if the camera lens has an axis parallel to the polar axis?
3 years 6 months ago #59623

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In principles there is no difference if you move the mount. But you’re not. You are moving the ballhead. The mount still is pointed at Polaris. So, instead of moving the ballhead, try loosening the clutches of the mount and rotate the entire mount so it points at the Andromeda Nebula or whatever target you chose. Then do a sync and see if that solves the issue.

Another word of advice: raspberry pi machines have no internal real time clock. This means that the time and possibly the date of the raspberry pi WILL be off when you switch it on. Make sure to set the time (and possibly date) before starting KStars as that may be a source of problems as well.


Clear skies, Wouter
3 years 6 months ago #59625

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Yes I noticed that the time is wrong. But I did not fix it on system level, I just changed the time in Kstars. Might that be the problem? Is Ekos using system time instead of Kstars time?
3 years 6 months ago #60791

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It is using system time. You can see that in the log messages for the mount when you switch on INDI. You get a popup with your equipment and when you go to the mount tab, you can see that it reports the time that is sent to the mount. So that is ONE problem. The other problem is that you should not move the ball head but the entire mount.
3 years 6 months ago #60792

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