Patchy Clouds - Terrible Guiding - Could we have a poor rms alert?

[NY2KW]

Last night I was imaging from a remote site with NINA/PHD2. It became cloudy and not surprisingly there was a prolonged period of terrible guiding but it never stopped guiding.  So NINA chugged away and almost all my images were long star streaks.  From 23:44p – 04:23a there were Star lost - low SNR =293, Star lost - low mass = 88, Star lost - mass changed = 154 and  No star found= 24 with Total = 559 but guiding never stopped.  In spite of the long streaky stars or subs off target, NINA read the HFR as 1.9 -2.2 (which I don't understand). There was 3 short period of 'normal' guiding in this period.  I know there is a NINA plug-in called PHD2TOOLS that would allow triggers to stop guiding and recovery or end session but several others have said it is prone to crashing NINA and /or PHD2.   Is it reasonable to ask for some alert range within PHD2 that would either stop guiding or send an alert to NINA?

TIA, Jerry 

https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_VwXM.zip

[Bruce Waddington]

I think this is just another form of an old topic which is recovery from poor observing conditions.  Recovery belongs in the imaging application/session manager because that is the only place that has the context and all the necessary tools to do an effective job.  The role of PHD2 is to provide all the information necessary for an imaging application to know what's going on and make decisions about what to do - and that's what PHD2 does.  Applications can subscribe to a real-time broadcast of events which includes lost-star events (for any reason) and frame-by-frame details of guide star movement and corrections.  So PHD2 doesn't need to do anything new to 'alert' NINA,  that machinery is already in place.  Evidently, many of the session manager apps don't take advantage of this information which is unfortunate - but it's not a reason for PHD2 to further muddy the water by trying to take unilateral action on its own.  If the plug-in you're talking about doesn't work correctly, wouldn't it make more sense to address that?

Looking at the bigger picture, it sounds like you probably became very frustrated while trying to operate in conditions that were simply not good enough.  I know from experience that no amount of recovery logic is going to fix that.  <g>

Regards,

Bruce

[Jerry Stern]

Thanks Bruce.  Of course you’re right.  I later realized that NINA is receiving a real-time data stream from PHD2. I searched their API and found IGuiderMediator and next will look to see what it exposes.  Maybe I’ll write my own plug-in 😊

 

Jerry

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[Dale Ghent]

Can you cite your source for PHD2 Tools plugin crashing "NINA and/or PHD2"? There are a lot of people in this hobby who say wild bs based purely on supposition and a complete lack of awareness of actual cause.

NINA itself has a built in "Restore Guiding" trigger that will always attempt to restart guiding if PHD2 is not actually guiding due to lost star or insufficient SNR - items that can also be adjusted in PHD2's own configuration so addressing this issue is not _purely_ a NINA thing. I've seen plenty of people turn knobs they shouldn't in blind attempts to solve a perceived problem and end up making things worse for themselves, whereupon blame is placed on anything but themselves.

-Dale

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[Brian Valente]

>>>  I know there is a NINA plug-in called PHD2TOOLS that would allow triggers to stop guiding and recovery or end session but several others have said it is prone to crashing NINA and /or PHD2. 

Jerry from your comments it sounds like you've maybe *heard* this but haven't tried the plugin yourself? 

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Brian 

Brian Valente

astronomy portfolio https://www.astrobin.com/users/bvalente/ 

[Jerry Stern]

Hi Dale,

 

I heard from people in the Starfront Discord room who are respected as ‘veterans’ in AP, where this was discussed yesterday, so my gut reaction was to believe them.  Being a newbie at a remote site, I was reluctant to try things that may cause problems.  If you look at the PHD2 look I uploaded, PHD2 never stopped guiding for over 4 hours of crazy data so NINA could never “Restore Guiding” which I do have as a trigger.  I’m very new at this but it’s difficult to believe this would not be a relatively common scenario for remote imagers.  You are the Expert and if you say that PHD2Tools is stable – that’s a perfect solution and I will spread the news 😊

 

Best regards,

 

Jerry  

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[bw_m...@earthlink.net]

I think you need to slow down a bit here and work through things systematically.  I don’t see anyone, including Dale, saying there’s no problem and that everything is great.  I explained that your issue is not really in the purview of PHD2, but I haven’t said there isn’t a problem elsewhere. My interpretation of what Dale said is that he’s unaware of a problem like you’ve described and is dubious about it.  So to make any progress, you need to try using the appropriate software components for whatever you’re trying to do.  You need to do that yourself rather than just parroting something you heard on a forum.  If you run into problems, you should carefully document what you did and what happened and hopefully provide a repeatable test case that can help isolate the problem.  You should then communicate directly with whomever is responsible for the software – that would be this forum for PHD2 and presumably the NINA Discord for NINA or a NINA plug-in.   If you do all that and a problem is discovered and corrected, everyone benefits.  If there isn’t a problem but simply an operational error or a misunderstanding, then you benefit.  Either way, progress is made.

 

Bruce

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