Jacob,

The mount safety limits should be set for your own setup with everything installed on the telescope. By slewing and centring the telescope you will be able to see when the camera touches the mount. At that point you should back off a bit and set that limit. You will need to do this for both sides of the meridian and then set the western go to limit.

The instructions to do this are here Setting Losmandy Gemini 2 Safety Limits .

Now, to set INDI you need to understand how the limits work.

If you are outside the safety limits and command a goto that does not cross the limits then it will go there without a flip.
If you are outside the safety limits and command a goto that is outside the opposite limit then it will go there with a flip.
If the telescope is tracking and reaches the Western Limit it will not perform a slew.
When the telescope is tracking and passes the Western limit - Western Goto Limit but has not reached the Western Limit and a goto to the current position is issued it will perform a flip.

So INDI needs to issue a slew to the current location when the mount is betwen the Western limit - Western Goto Limit and the Western Limit.
This is expressed in degrees but I prefer to think of it in minutes.
Unfortunately INDI does not allow you to enter a range where it should issue the slew command.
With INDI you enter when the slew should be issued, which should be the number of degrees or minutes after or before the Meridian and should match the Western limit - Western Goto Limit value (with a small allowance for matching the mount with INDI).

When INDI knows the mounts has reached the specified position it will command a slew if it is not capturing an image - and that is important - it waits for the capture to finish.

When the capture finishes it will issue the slew command.
This should work as long as the Western limit has not been reached - but INDI does not know this, it assumes it will work.
It really needs a range to work properly, so that it can determine if it will work - I have detailed this in a previous post.

So, for it to work reliably you need to try and have as large a Western Goto Limit as possible. In my case I needed to buy a pier extention for my tripod to raise the telescope enough that the legs did not interfere with the camera.

Paul

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Peter,

I gave up using the Polar alignment routines a couple of years ago and solely rely on PHD2 drift alignment.

The software stopped issuing the rotate commands.

Paul

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Jacob,

You haven't provided many details but that sounds like a limits issue.

It is critical to have the INDI software and mount Limits aligned or things will not happen when they should.

Other than that, I can only suggest that the Losmandy Gemini 2 is not giving me an INDI specific issues.

Paul

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Bruce,

You already have both those options on the Capture page under the limits option.

Paul

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After sorting out the solver issues, I have now had a chance to use the new file naming.

This is a significant improvement, except where it replaces a space with an underscore.

It is normal and expected that many object names contain spaces and replacing that with an underscore is both annoying and appears to be unneccessary. It means I have to rename the files after, which is what I have always had to do and is no real improvement.

Paul

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Gene,

Yes, I agree nothing like the following was displayed.


[2023-01-06T05:42:35.207 EST INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.align] - "Only searching for solutions within 30 degrees of RA,Dec (100.267,90)"
[2023-01-06T05:42:35.216 EST INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.align] - "Field 1 did not solve (index index-4206-03.fits, field objects 1-10)."

Paul

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Jasem,

As detailed in my earlier posts, you do one plate solve and then attempt another, the second and subsequent attempts always failed.

Paul

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Gene,

I did have logging for astrometry running and included the output in an earlier post.

Paul

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Gene,

The new Option under StellarSolver Options - Automatic and Manual rotator control - seems to be the cause of the issue.

Even though I have no rotator, it was selected (not by me) and and I have now deselected it and the solving seems to be working again.

This option should not be selectable unless you have a rotator.

Paul

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Gene,

I am not running a stable version in either case, that is why I keep many versions to allow me to keep working when things fail.

So, the version is whatever was available from the repository at the date of the build.

I have also noticed that a new Option has appeared under StellarSolver Options - Automatic and Manual rotator control.

This was selected even though I did not do it and even though I have no rotator, and I have now deselected it to see if it has any impact.

Paul

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Gene,

The version dates were both obtained from the About Kstars window; ignoring the time.

I have both running Local ASTAP with H18.

The problem happens with internal solver and ASTAP.

INDI is different on each version - it was the version available at the time I did the builds - which are now 10 months apart.

On the assumption this would be fixed, I have done rebuilds about half a dozen times over the last two months, some with a complete build and others incremental.

I have also gone through all the alignment settings and found the only one that is defferent is Align - Align Options Profile Editor - Conv FWHM which is 2 on the older 32bit working version but 1 on the current 64bit failing version.

There are a few new settings Thresh Multiple - 2, Thresh Offset - 0 and Conv Filter - Guassian.

Paul

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Gene,

I don't have a FITS file and the logs don't seem to show up anything, but I don't have them all enabled.

I also didn't have any issues until a build in November, but I cannot recall the date, but it has been happening with all builds since.

It is under Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit 2022-12-31.

The working version is a build on Raspbery Pi OS 32 bit 2022-02-04.

I may be wrong, but It appears to be a programming issue since there were no configuration changes when it first failed, although I have tried lots of changes since.

The problem is that it doesn;t get to astronomical darkness until about 10:30pm and so there is little time to test it as I want to actually collect data, before I swap over to the working version.

Paul

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Gene,

There are two things to consider here

1) The first time it always solves correctly
2) I use the same settings on a year old version and it works flawlessly

Paul

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