In the guide cam image the green square is not centered on a star. Is Select Auto Star selected or do you select a star manually before starting the guiding calibration?


Wouter

Thats how it looks here. Always running away to the top...

Edit: How neccesary would you say is the orientation of the guidecam as well as the exact alignemnt of guidescope and main scope?

cheers
Niki

Wouter, when you look closely you see that Auto-Star is selected.

I am not sure what is going on, but I also would like to know the Kstars version that was used in those instances.
Remember how we were trying to solve the guiding variations last year, only to revert back to the default values in the internal guiding module.
I have exclusively used the internal guider for the last 2 years and it has been rock-solid for me.
The "cannot reach guidestar after 21 iteration possible mount or backslash problem" issue was caused by a bug in the ZWO driver back when we were dealing with this some 18 months ago, or so. So if that is back, then the ZWO driver may be at fault again?
My guiding still works great, but I also did not upgrade to the latest Indi version yet.
Please post the version you are using.

Cheers

Jo

I guided last night with an eq6-r and an asi120c-s on a converted finder scope. With the exception of a tight cable at one point, I was able to guide sub 1arcsec 600second exposures all night...and yes i'm stoked by that unusually good night.
With my new system I've found my tracking failures are almost always related to cable drag or polar misalignment. Also, I always clear any sync and tuning when I start each night as the mount tends to log erroneous settings from the previous setup if I don't. This could creep into tracking speeds on some mounts. I've found that I have better results by actually forcing the mount to be a bit west weighted(camera/focuser tilted west a bit) then shooting east, to help avoid bouncing on backlash. I tend to run my gains a bit high and I most recently switched my eq6r to 1.00x in settings and guiding.

Hope something here is of help to you.

Clear skies!
Ray

It looks like you are using be internal guider correct? Did you try the same thing using phd2 remotely from Ekos?

I am not sure I understand the PS in the original post. PHD2 can be used with Ekos remotely . I worked pretty hard about a year ago to use their api to update Ekos so that it would talk more thoroughly with PHD2 to integrate all the functions that I could into the Ekos interface so that running phd2 remotely would send all the info back and it would act mostly like you are using the internal guider. Is this what you are looking for? Because if so it already does it.

Or are you meaning that you want the internal guider to be updated to work more like phd2?

One thing that should be noted is that if you are imaging with a raspberry pi remotely over the network, the best plan is to run phd2 on the pi and to control it from Ekos on your laptop. It would not be a good plan to try to guide with the Ekos internal guider controlling a guide camera over WiFi on a pi. Phd2 running on the pi is much more responsive due to download times

It looks like you are using be internal guider correct? Did you try the same thing using phd2 remotely from Ekos?

I am not sure I understand the PS in the original post. PHD2 can be used with Ekos remotely . I worked pretty hard about a year ago to use their api to update Ekos so that it would talk more thoroughly with PHD2 to integrate all the functions that I could into the Ekos interface so that running phd2 remotely would send all the info back and it would act mostly like you are using the internal guider. Is this what you are looking for? Because if so it already does it.

Or are you meaning that you want the internal guider to be updated to work more like phd2?

One thing that should be noted is that if you are imaging with a raspberry pi remotely over the network, the best plan is to run phd2 on the pi and to control it from Ekos on your laptop. It would not be a good plan to try to guide with the Ekos internal guider controlling a guide camera over WiFi on a pi. Phd2 running on the pi is much more responsive due to download times

I am currently guiding with today's nightly build and I do not experience any problems. I started the night with yesterday's nightly and did not experience any guiding problems with this version either.

An ASI 294 for guiding and an ASI 294Pro for imaging are being used. Nightly Ekos running on Kubuntu 19.04.

Hi,

I highly recommend using PHD2 for guiding. I had problems like you are describing for at least a year, up until early July, which is when I switched to PHD2. Since then, guiding has been much much better.

PHD2 is fairly well integrated with EKOS, but it does require that you start it up separately from kstars/EKOS. This has not been a problem for me.

A very useful part of PHD2 is Guiding Assistant. I highly recommend using it for 2x or 3x your worm period before you start guiding.

Anyway, I don't mean to diss the guiding in EKOS, but it seems that implementing a guiding algorithm is a lot harder than it might seem at first. PHD2 has so much good stuff in it, plus excellent documentation. I don't know what the magic is, but I'd give PHD2 a try.

Charles

Hi Rob,

Re "integrate all the functions that I could in Ekos" Are the guide star image and guiding history currently supposed to be displayed in the Setup pane of EKOS when using PHD2? They show up for me only when using internal guiding.

Thanks

I use the daily build. KStars 3.3.6, INDI 1.8.1-2.6. Guide camera ASI 174.
Cable drag and balance might be a factor although neither were adjusted going from bad to good guiding.
Did the same image again last night with similar results, started badly and gradually became stable. In my
case I'm thinking it might be associated with the location in the sky which was directly overhead. Started
settup right after a meridian flip, combined perhaps with balance or cabling. As the target moved a little
westward things calmed down, just a thought.

My last experiences with the internal guider are, that it helped quite a lot to check back the polar-alignment and to sync the scopes EXACTLY to the same star.
This is proved by the fact, that when i was using OffAxisGuiding, things went much better.
I hade to change to finder-guiding because of hardware...

cheers
Niki

Yes Absolutely, you should be getting information from PHD2 when using it for external guiding. You should get both the image and the guiding information. This is what I spent so much time getting working properly. If there is an issue where some functionality got lost because somebody was working on something related, and it broke one of these things, I can go back and fix it again.

There are supposed to be two ways you can use PHD2. There is an option that says "Receive all external guide frames." The way that this should work is that if you have the same guide camera connected both to PHD2 and to Ekos, you can have the image fully load in both places. Ekos has no need for this image, since it isn't doing the guiding, but you can have it display there for you to see what the guider is doing. The other possibility is that you could have Ekos display just the star profile image, which PHD2 is always sending with the guide data no matter whether the camera is only connected to PHD2 or if it is an INDI camera. The method I always use is to get just the star profile image and I know that method is working because I use it all the time. If the other method no longer works for some reason, let me know and I will look into it.

My belief is that the option to receive just the star profile image is far superior to receiving the whole external guide frame. If you have the camera connected to INDI and it has to send images across the wifi network, that really slows down response time for guiding. It is much better to set up your INDI profile to leave out the Guide camera if it is natively supported by PHD2, then directly connect your camera to PHD2, and connect to PHD2 from Ekos. This won't hurt the control of the camera because PHD2 is the one doing the guiding and you can control most of the important functions from Ekos. The star profile image and all guiding data will come back to Ekos, and while the star profile image isn't that big, it is definitely good enough to see the star PHD2 is using for guiding and to see that there are no problems with the guider. As I said, I know this is working perfectly still because I was just using it last night and I have it running right now in the simulators with no issues.

This is a current screenshot right now with the latest versions of everything.