Guiding failures

I know this topic of failure to reach original star when guiding calibrating has been discussed several times. I recently went through this with great difficulty to resolve. I finally got a working solution that I would like to see integrated into Kstars as a tool. I went back to a windows tool Pempro which has a backlash measuring tool. Measured the backlash and entered into the indi driver for success. I also know the mount is long in the tooth for a tear down and cleaning so there may be multiple issues at play here.... I don't think I am a 1 off user here. Thanks for your consideration on this issue.... Bruce

Bruce,

Re making contributions to KStars Thanks for your interest in improving KStars! I recently added instructions on how new developers might get started to the KStars README file. If it is not clear, please post questions, and hopefully we can get you started. -- A great "starter project' would be improving the parts of the README that aren't clear You can then submit MRs and have them reviewed.

Re Guiding failures: Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what the issue you're referring to is. Do you mean "losing track of the guide star"? If so, I made significant improvements to that in the SEP MultiStar guider star-detection algorithm, and I'd encourage you to try that if you aren't already. If you are using that and it's still having that issue, I'd love to see a log or two with debugging output enabled for at least guide, fits and capture. If the issue is that the guider doesn't return to exactly the same same spot as where it started from when calibrating, yes, that's on my list, and shouldn't be to bad an issue to ultimately fix, but I wanted all the other changes i made to "settle down", and make sure other things were working well first. If it's something else entirely, please explain further.

Thanks,
Hy

I am specifically talking about not returning to guide star. I made some progress by measuring the backlash in PemPro, then using those numbers in the INDI driver for EQMod.. The guiding software itself seemed to work ok once I used the larger backlash numbers. My backlash was measured at 770 msec which is huge in my mind. It is a EQ8 mount which is not know for tight tolerances. I am just saying, if Kstars had a tool like PemPro to measure backlash, I could have gotten to the solution faster... For example, this would mean moving the mount in one direction, say for 1 second (larger than most backlash measurement), then one second back the other way . The second pulse wont get you back to the star, but incrementing the back step until it does with the difference between the two directions becomes the backlash measurement. Just my thoughts.... Bruce