I had pretty good driver related experience with Celestron AVX. Not sure how it is different from CGX. It is lightweight, but it barely handled my EdgeHD 8". I can hardly imagine it juggling 28 lbs 
I switched to Losmandy G11T and it had some bumps in the driver. The fixes are already done and it now does what I want. You may choose G11 or G811 if you want it lighter. They all work exactly the same with regards to automation.
Read More...
I too did something similar recently. It appears, dithering only works within a sequence independently. Also, its frequency must be set to no more than a half of the sequence length it it won't run at all. I ended up with a repeated sequence of 6 shots: RGBRGB and dithering set at every 3 frames. Effectively it dithers every 6 frames in the middle of each sequence.
The more I use Ekos the more I feel like, for my use scenarios, repetitions should be handled at sequence level, not in scheduler.
Read More...
A few use scenarios when I wanted some sort of mask, ROI, annulus for the guide camera:
- I stick an ASI432MM into a ZWO mini guide scope. The sensor covers much more than the lens can project well. Stars beyond ~30% annulus (like in Focus module) are elongated. I don't immediately see any bad effects on guiding though.
- With Edge HD 8", reducer and OAG the guiding frame is on the edge of the scope's image circle. There are some very elliptical stars again and more artifacts in certain part of the image that occasionally detected as stars. Unlike the first case, the good part is not a circle in the center of the frame but some complex shape.
- With an OAG and short guide exposures the few stars that are in the frame have to compete with camera's amp glow noise. I spent some time configuring a profile for guiding creatively, with some success. It would be easier if I could simply exclude areas of the frame where the amp glow is strongest. For my camera, a simple ROI option would cover this.
Read More...
I used to have unpark on start and park on shutdown check boxes enabled and it worked. Recently those boxes started being grayed out and parking at shutdown is not done anymore.
Here is the log with debug stuff enabled for scheduler and mount.
It looks like Scheduler believes that mount is not capable of un/parking. However, once Ekos is started, parking is actually available in the Mount tab or directly from INDI. I added a shutdown script that initiates parking via indi_setprop and it works. Checkboxes are still grayed out all the way though the session.
Read More...
Does the
indi_sqm_weather
driver support the
SQM-LU
(USB-only) device? Any other variant of the SQM besides the SQM-LE?
The driver page says it's only for SQM-LE. The driver code mentions two connection options, namely Ethernet and serial, whatever that means...
Read More...
Regular alignment on job start works with either internal solver or ASTAP.
If I set 'Verify captured image position every 2 frames', every other image triggers a 'Solver failed: 16.2s' kind of message. Position drift remains unknown of course. Same story with both internal solver and ASTAP. I tried enabling all sorts of logs but got nothing more from this procedure (there are many unrelated messages though), only that one message at the end.
I see new threads or ASTAP process spawned. The time taken is similar to what it takes to successfully solve an image. I suspect it is actually OK, but results are broken on the way back. I tried actually do 'Load & Slew' with a just captured image. It solved the image nicely.
If I set 'Verify captured image position every 1 frames', KStars crashes right after it gets the first image. Again, nothing from the solver in the logs. I'll try to fetch crash dump next time.
Read More...
There are multiple sessions in the log.
The first one or two had only the mount device with focuser connected via AUX port. Some focuser properties are reported in the log by the Celestron AVX device. OT drop down showed no focusers.
After some tinkering I re-connected the focuser with a USB cable, added the Celestron SCT device to the profile, and it became available in the OT configuration. This is how it worked for the rest of the night. It works fine this way, except cabling is less convenient.
Read More...
It just got worse with the last release of KStars. Optical trains configurator does not recognize the focuser presense. So both trains have no focuser rendering Focus module unusable. Focuser tab is there under mount's INDI device and I can tinker with it directly.
Read More...