RA Starts going crazy out of nowhere

[Aidan Bonicker]

Today I was able to get my guiding to work for about an hour using the same calibration I used a few days ago and days before that, but now my RA is starting to get really bad. At first the guiding was being weird after dithering and these random spikes would happen. I decided to recalibrate and check my polar alignment and the I tried again and now my RA is going up and up. I tried unplugging and replugging my ST4 cord and that seemed to maybe work for about 30 seconds and then it happened again. Not really sure if this is a cord problem or not cause it worked fine for 5 hours a couple days ago. 

I'm using a star adventurer gti with an svbony 905c guide camera and sv165 guide scope. 

https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_YJ2p.zipESW

Thanks!

[Aidan Bonicker]

My link isn't working I believe this one should https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_YJ2p.zip

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[Aidan Bonicker]

I have some more information to share. I noticed that even when I wasn't guiding, all my stars were very quickly moving northwards. It's like my mount wasn't tracking in RA anymore. I also noticed that the coordinates in PHD2 and EKOS were not the same and they weren't syncing at all. I reset my settings and reconnected everything and now my mount is syncing and the northward drift isn't happening anymore. Anyone know what could have be causing this?

[Bruce Waddington]

I can't tell what's going on here, your last log shows a bunch of short guiding sessions that are too brief to provide useful info.  I do see that you have disabled Dec guiding for some reason and your polar alignment was quite poor.  Whatever mismatch you're seeing in terms of scope pointing position doesn't make much sense either - PHD2 gets those coordinates from the mount driver.  My general impression, perhaps unwarranted,  is that you've just been flailing around here.   I think you should probably start over by following the attached procedure.  This means just running PHD2 by itself, with no imaging, the goal being to get all your gear working correctly and getting decent guiding results.   Don't ignore any alerts you see from PHD2 and be sure to work through the procedure carefully and systematically.  If you can get us 20 minutes of guiding data on each side of the meridian in addition to completing  the other steps, we may be able to help you out.

Bruce

[Bryan]

FYI

[Aidan Bonicker]

Thanks for the advice, but looking back at my logs I think I can give some more context. On the 4th I was able to guide perfectly fine with no problems for about 5 hours. About 90 minutes into my guide session yesterday I started having some problems with my dec. Because of my backlash I usually only guide in one direction. I thought maybe my polar alignment was so spot on that it was causing it to guide in both directions. I'm not entirely sure whether I tried recalibrating or I tried a drift align or something else but after this moment my Ra would just start crashing. It's like I had gone into ekos and switched my tracking off. My guide stars were shifting north incredibly quickly. I checked in Ekos and my guiding was on. This also when I noticed that when I slewed to the southern meridian my coordinates in EKOS weren't updating at all; they were staying on the elephant trunk, which is what I was aiming at. After trying to fix this for 3 hours I just turned off all my equipment and reset everything. I got everything set back and redid calibration and for the last hour of the night everything went smoothly. Maybe this was a one time random glitch that happened. It seems to me that my tracking was completely off or it was tracking completely wrong. (it was showing as on though in the indi control panel) Maybe since the coordinates weren't synced right my mount was trying to track like it was still aimed at the Elephant trunk but in reality it was pointed elsewhere. 

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