Anand, I checked my EQMod Mount settings, and indeed, "Reverse West/East" in the Motion Control tab was checked! No idea how that happened, but after I unchecked that setting, polar alignment works again. Problem solved! Many thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
Axel

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Same issue here. My equipment:

  • KStars Version 3.6.6 Stable (Build: 2023-08-01T13:00:35Z)
  • Raspberry PI 4 (4 GB) with Ubuntu Mate 22.04.3 LTS
  • Mount: EQ6-R Pro
The "First mount rotation remaining degrees" are increasing instead of decreasing:
[2023-08-19T21:19:56.517 EDT DEBG ][     org.kde.kstars.ekos.align] - "First mount rotation remaining degrees:" 30
[2023-08-19T21:19:57.591 EDT DEBG ][     org.kde.kstars.ekos.align] - "First mount rotation remaining degrees:" 30.2626
[2023-08-19T21:19:58.662 EDT DEBG ][     org.kde.kstars.ekos.align] - "First mount rotation remaining degrees:" 32.3222
Logs are attached.

As a work-around, I found that checking the "Manual slew" box and manually slewing to the new position (using Mount Control from the "Mount" tab) lets me complete the polar alignment process.

Clear skies,
Axel

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Axel Mellinger replied to the topic 'How to back up SD card' in the forum. 1 year ago

Yes, I do periodic backups of my SD card. This way, if a new KStars/Ekos version causes any problems, I can always go back to a working installation.

After inserting the SD card into a card reader, which is plugged into my Linux machine, I run

sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=backup.img bs=1M status=progress
(replace the "X" in /dev/sdX with the actual drive letter that's shown by the dmesg command after you have inserted your SD card into a card reader.)

Optionally, compress the image with a file compression tool of your choice. (For best compression results, I first delete all FITS files from the SD card and run zerofree on the loopback-mounted SD-card image to fill unused file system blocks with zeros. This brings the backup image size down from an uncompressed 64 GBytes to around 6 GBytes.)

For other operating systems, see here for ways to back up SD cards .

Axel

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Axel Mellinger replied to the topic 'kstars / indi versioning ?' in the forum. 4 years ago

Jasem's PPA provides the latest versions of Kstars/Indi only for currently supported Ubuntu releases. 19.04 reached its end of life in January 2020.

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This morning I noticed an interesting behavior of the shutdown procedure. After a night of taking O-III and S-II frames, I was surprised to see that the sequence queue did not show the jobs as "completed", but as "Aborted" (O-III) and "Idle" (S-II). Yet, the images were there.



After going through the logs, I am beginning to understand what happened. After taking all 85 O-III frames and 80 out of 85 S-II frames, the scheduler reached astronomical twilight at 05:09 local time:
[2020-08-08T05:08:02.601 EDT INFO ][           org.kde.kstars.fits] - Loading FITS file  "/home/axel/astro/IC_1396/Light/SII/IC_1396_Light_SII_120_secs_122.fits"
[2020-08-08T05:08:02.603 EDT INFO ][   org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - "Received image 80 out of 85."
[2020-08-08T05:08:02.685 EDT INFO ][   org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - "Capturing 120.000-second SII image..."
[2020-08-08T05:08:02.786 EDT INFO ][           org.kde.kstars.indi] - ZWO CCD ASI1600MM Pro :  "[INFO] Taking a 120 seconds frame... "
[2020-08-08T05:09:02.815 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.scheduler] - "Job 'IC 1396' is now approaching astronomical twilight rise limit at Sat Aug 8 05:09:00 2020 (0 minutes safety margin), marking idle."
[2020-08-08T05:09:02.824 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.scheduler] - "Job 'IC 1396' is stopping guiding..."
[2020-08-08T05:09:02.825 EDT INFO ][   org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - "Autoguiding stopped. Aborting..."
Thus, the job was aborted. However, in the scheduler, the "Aborted Job Management" was set to "Queue" with a 0 s delay:

Thus, the job was immediately restarted. At that time, apparently, the astronomical twilight limit was re-calculated. Since it was a new day (the original job started before midnight), and since the nights are getting longer, the new twilight was 05:12. Thus, the scheduler thought it had 3 minutes left before dawn and re-started the job. At 05:12, job execution was aborted again, and this time the mount was properly parked:
[2020-08-08T05:10:16.279 EDT INFO ][   org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - "Job requires 120.000-second OIII images, has 0/85 frames captured and will be processed."
[2020-08-08T05:10:16.284 EDT INFO ][   org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - "Capturing 120.000-second OIII image..."
[2020-08-08T05:10:16.535 EDT INFO ][           org.kde.kstars.indi] - ZWO CCD ASI1600MM Pro :  "[INFO] Taking a 120 seconds frame... "
[2020-08-08T05:10:40.969 EDT INFO ][     org.kde.kstars.ekos.guide] - "Lost track of the guide star. Searching for guide stars..."
[2020-08-08T05:10:45.132 EDT INFO ][     org.kde.kstars.ekos.guide] - "Autoguiding started."
[2020-08-08T05:12:01.677 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.scheduler] - "Job 'IC 1396' is now approaching astronomical twilight rise limit at Sat Aug 8 05:12:00 2020 (0 minutes safety margin), marking idle."
[2020-08-08T05:12:01.684 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.scheduler] - "Job 'IC 1396' is stopping guiding..."
[2020-08-08T05:12:03.678 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.scheduler] - Starting shutdown process...
[2020-08-08T05:12:03.678 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.scheduler] - "Warming up CCD..."
[2020-08-08T05:12:03.727 EDT INFO ][   org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - "Cooler is off"

Looking at all the scheduler's settings, I think there are two that could have prevented this sequence of events:
  1. Set the "Aborted Job Managment" delay to at least 5 minutes (must be larger than the daily change in astronomical twilight)
  2. A few minutes of Pre-dawn time in the scheduler options (it was set to zero). I also should have turned on "Remember Job Progress", so that the sequence would continue with the aborted S-II sequence, rather than re-start O-III:

Am I on the right track? Any thoughts?

Axel

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Interesting. Your version seems to be similar to the one from the stable release , which (at least for me) did not have any alignment issues. (It did have an autofocus issue , which is why I switched to a more recent version).

I compiled KStars using the instructions on GitHub . If you change the install prefix in the cmake command from

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ../kstars
to
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ../kstars
you should be able to have the new KStars version side by side with the one from Astroberry.

Axel

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I wonder if you are experiencing the same issue reported here and here . Do you know which KStars / INDI version Astroberry 2.0.2 uses? I fixed my problem by compiling the KStars code from GitHub (commit 446481d5fb485ec6437c43bb6bcc1c5b76adedfd).

Axel

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I did one full night of imaging with the latest KStars from GitHub (commit 446481d5fb485ec6437c43bb6bcc1c5b76adedfd) and INDI 1.8.5 from the stable PPA. My EQ6-R mount slewed and aligned to four different targets without problems.
Axel

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I have been following this thread, since I ran into the same problem. Here what I did tonight:

  • Compiled KStars from the latest github source (commit db1a82113a54b2e568ee4a259053b88d4473379e)
  • Left INDI at the last stable version (1.8.5) from the ppa

I then did a few "Capture & Solve" runs to different targets (Delta Cyg, M 13, M 57, M 27), and everything is working fine for now.
My system: Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB) running Ubuntu 20.04 with Mate desktop. Log is attached.

Could this indicate that the issue may be with INDI rather than KStars?

Axel

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Axel Mellinger replied to the topic 'Warnings during Autofocus' in the forum. 4 years ago

I'm wondering the same thing. I recently had the issue that the automatic autofocus upon a filter change did not work , and my logs showed the message

Ignoring Received FITS CCD1 as it has the wrong capture mode 1

When I updated Kstars and INDI from the stable ppa:mutlaqja/ppa to the nightly builds ppa:mutlaqja/indinightly, I got the autofocus back. However, the logs still show the same message. This is with an ASI1600MM Pro camera and the ZWO EFW.

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A quick update in case anyone experienced similar problems: Updating Kstars from 6:3.4.2+202004251749~ubuntu19.10.1 to nightly build 6:3.4.3+202006171130~ubuntu19.10.1 (from ppa:mutlaqja/indinightly) solved the problem; autofocus upon a filter change works again.

Axel

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