Yannic Delisle replied to the topic 'Writing dslr temperature' in the forum. 4 years ago

I come from Backyard OES where I found that feature really useful. I could not find this feature in Ekos and thought that was because I was saving as FIT files and not using the native RAW format of my Canon 1000D (CR2 files)

In BYOE I got files named like this : Light_0012_ISO800_300s__18C_M57.CR2 where "18C" is the temperature in Celsius.

I would love to see this implemented in Ekos :)

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Anyone else having this issue ?

When taking flat frames with a DSLR, if I set the duration to 0.004 I get this (correct duration)

2019-12-10T20:42:40 Capturing 0.004-second image...

But if I set it to 0.0004 I get this (all zeros)

2019-12-10T20:43:47 Capturing 0.000-second image... therefore the file name looks like this:

Test_Flat_0.000_secs_2019-12-10T20-04-44_001.fit

This is not a big issue but that would be nice to have it fixed so I can go back to flat frames and know the exact duration time I had setup.

I am running Kstars 3.3.6, Stellarmate image is 1.4.4 so this might have been fixed (?)

Thanks!

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the.cakemaker wrote: Just wanted to inform that i have crashes here too. Running KStars on my ASUS VIVOBOOK with KDE Neon and Plasma.
I can sometimes trigger that by using the fitsviewer, and sometimes its just out of nothing...
But when a session is running, and i do not do too much clicking around its stable.

cheers
Niki


Same here. I don't remember cr

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Ihoujin wrote: Clicking the zoom to fit button in the align module has often resulted in kstars crashing for me. It seems to happen mainly with large dslr frames, and if I click the button while the image is being solved.

Edit: Pi4, 4gb in Raspbian Buster


Same here, I usually crash when I click on the zoom buttons in the PA routine. INDI is still running but Kstars just shutdown and I have to launch it and then launch Ekos.

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Yannic Delisle replied to the topic 'Guiding nightmare' in the forum. 4 years ago

Ihoujin wrote: Thank you Rob for the suggestion to use the guide camera with it's natively supported PHD2 driver. Up to now I have been using it with the INDI driver because I like being able to use it for plate solving. On the Pi3 this was practically required because it was very slow to solve a large camera image. I'm using a Pi4 now, and the plate solving performance is far better now. So I will try moving away for guide scope pointing and dedicate it to PHD2 next time.


Same here. I use my guidecam to platesolve as well. Still on RPI3B+, I will move to RPI4 asap ..

I am sorry, as the OP, that I could not comment before on all your really good suggestions and tips. I will look at all of them and try to solve this issue. Just to be clear, I run everything on the PI and only connect via VNC, I use Stellarmate, my last PA had an error of 12'' and evertthing worked fine in a previous session. so it is still hard to understand what has changed. One of my friend said that it could be because it was quite windy those 2 nights but the fact that it was an error that was predictable and repeatable rules that out... or not. I will test again a on calm night, so far I do not see what I could change or improve beside going to PHD2. Guiding used to be that least of my worries as it had always worked for me, now it is my own personal nightmare ;)

so thanks again all for your comments and tips, I did learn some tricks and concepts better from all this !

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Yannic Delisle created a new topic ' Guiding nightmare' in the forum. 4 years ago

Hello all,

I need some advice on a guiding issue that is driving me crazy.

Two days ago I went out and was able to guide quite ok. I had to redo the calibration 2 or 3 times because it would fail with the message "cannot reach guidestar after 21 iteration possible mount or backslash problem" but in the end, it started guiding

Now last night, same gear, same location, same target ... I spend 3 hours doing calibration, it was driving me nuts, I changed settings like guiding pulse, size of the box to 64, swap DEC RA combination of all of this and it kept failling and then ... Bam ! it started guiding to my great relief. I enabled the logs hoping someone could look at these and maybe find some explanation.

I see that I am not the first one to post about this issue. Has anyone come up with a definitive answer on what should be done to correct this ?

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Yannic Delisle replied to the topic 'Interesting bug in Ekos' in the forum. 4 years ago

Just to clarify, when I click on ""open logs directory"" it does open the log directory but after a second it launches another instance of Kstars as well. I can reproduce this issue at will.

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Yannic Delisle created a new topic ' Interesting bug in Ekos' in the forum. 4 years ago

Hello all,

I encountered a strange behavior in Ekos/Kstars

Step to reproduce

-> Go to Kstars
-> press Ekos icon
-> in Ekos press "Logs" button
-> in the log option window, at the bottom click on "open logs directory"

This launches a new Kstars instance. Doing the same steps in that new instance launches another Kstars instance and so on...

Anyone else experiencing this ?

I am running Kstars 336/Stellarmate on RPI3

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Good to know !

I was about to move the star in the middle of the crosshair and remembered that having too perfect of a PA was not recommended (something with natural dithering I think?) I will dig a bit more on the subject ;)

Just to say that the process, when starting not to far from the NPC is quite easy and can achieve perfect PA in minutes... I am grateful that this is now part of Ekos :) I just needed some practice and field experience to enjoy the full beauty of it :)

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Quick update on this. I got the cahnce to go out last night and was able to test this.

On the first try I was 6° out (!!) and had a hard time getting closer and closer just using my screen but I wanted badly to avoid using the polar scope and see if I could manage using only the PA routine. After a couple of tries, getting closer each time, lo and behold, the crosshair was in the field of view. I was able to refine the PA and stopped doing the PA routine when I reached 55'' ... not sure if I should have tried getting closer to 0'' I hear that it can be good to not be perfectly aligned when doing astrophotography.

I realized that it is much easier when you are close to the NCP and can see the other side of the vector ;)

In summary, being close to the NCP helps a lot. It is challenging when you are in the field on a portable setup to be closely aligned on the first try so I guess I will still use the polarscope just to put polaris in the FOV and then do the routine to achieve perfect PA.



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Hello,

Yes, I did follow the steps. My issue is that I am so far away from the NCP that it is not in the FOV where the crosshair might already be but I cannot see it. Double clicking center the crosshair on the star I double click on, so even after proceeding with the alignment on this new star, I am of course way out of wack (1°+) .

So, as per Jasem comment "double clicking in any FITS viewer image would center the crosshair around that point. I just added code to disable this when polar aligning to prevent confusion. Should be in 3.3.5"

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