Experiencing issues guiding throughout the night after good startup

[Andrew Burwell]

I have a remote setup that's been operating well for 2 years. Mount is 10Micron with a TOA-130 and OAG.

Lately I'm getting all kinds of errors in NINA and PHD2 about guiding issues in the middle of the night. Things seem to start OK, and I get about an hour into imaging. But then start getting warnings from NINA that it will not dither because it thinks the mount is too close to the meridian (even though it's still an hour or more away). In the debug logs I'm seeing errors that it can't get the star. 

This could all be weather related! Clouds are known to pop up this time of year. We're in monsoon season in the desert of New Mexico, but I've also been experiencing hardware disconnects from my mount lately and want to either rule that is the culprit, or rule it out.

I'm attaching my debug and guide log. Images were being taken ok until about 2:08 am. But I'm finding errors in the debug log before that time. I'm also attaching the NINA log in case that's informative.

[Dale Ghent]

Andrew, Bruce and Brian aren't going to pick through NINA logs. They will want to see the relevant PHD2 logs which should be provided using the log uploader function in PHD2's Help menu.

/dlae

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> <NINA Log.zip><Archive.zip>

[Brian Valente]

I might Dale ;) especially since I use NINA

Andrew give us a bit to comb through this

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/8F77579F-1B6B-4C78-84A0-4D05D92A7BA7%40elemental.org.

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Brian 

Brian Valente

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

[Brian Valente]

Hi Andrew

FYI the two zip files you shared are both PHD logs

The basic problem is the star was lost and never really regained. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of information beyond that. a passing cloud or clouds could certainly explain that.

I suggest you enable diagnostic imaging logging for lost star events, found in advanced settings. If it happens again at least we can see what your guide camera sees.

Otherwise things look pretty good. Here are a few other minor observations

- you have a lot of settling fails. you might want to revisit those settings in NINA. it looks like you have pretty tight settle criteria but a short time to do it in

- your guidespeed is only 0.5x for a 10micron? Not sure why you don't put it at 1.0x

- i suggest you upgrade to the latest dev release, take advantage of the latest features 

I can't speak to the NINA error regarding dithering too close to the meridian. I have never seen that error myself, and it doesn't make sense to me. Probably one for NINA discord

Brian

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[Andrew Burwell]

Hi All, I've updated to the new PHD2. Re-ran calibration last night using the assistants. Things started out well, until almost the exact same time and same issues tonight. I'll reiterate that this is a remote setup which has been running almost flawlessly for two years. So trying to track down the specific thing that is happening here so I can address it. In the last 3 months I did start to get random disconnects of the mount. I have the reconnect trigger for the mount to reconnect it upon disconnection. It could be related to this but not sure.

IN PHD2 I had the following warning: Guiding Stopped, the scope started slewing. In NINA I saw the attached screenshot with error messages. At 1:58 am there's apparently a slew or stop tracking that happened which caused movement during that 10 minute capture. Every capture after that there appears to be no tracking and every image looks like the attached. I've also attached the NINA log and linked the PHD logs.

https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_9Znc.zip

[Andrew Burwell]

Thanks Brian, I really appreciate the feedback! You've always been super helpful. My settle time out is 40 seconds, and guiding start timeout is 300, both of these seem like high recovery times for a 10micron, so I did find it strange that I see those errors. I'll grab the latest dev release and try 1.0x guiding to see how/if that improves anything.

Regards,

Andrew

On Saturday, July 12, 2025 at 8:37:58 AM UTC-5 bval...@gmail.com wrote:

[Dale Ghent]

While the symptoms have the appearance of being unrelated, my eye keeps coming back to these spontaneous driver disconnects you describe. It’s quite often that these happenings aren’t problems but are symptoms of a deeper common  cause. Fixing or even making sense of the symptoms is impossible without addressing whatever the deeper root cause is. Drivers disconnecting on their own is not normal and should not be papered-over with reconnect triggers. It’s generally a sign of a real problem at hand. 

In this case, I have to wonder if you might have a failing mount power supply. I have no idea how you are powering your setup, but it’s not uncommon to have the mount powered by an unregulated AC to DC brick-style power supply. These can and do go bad in a variety of ways, especially when subjected to prolonged heat. I’ve seen symptoms of such failing PSU be inexplicable mount behavior- stalls while slewing and random disconnects among them. Sometimes things spontaneously resolve only to appear again later. See if your remote site has a spare PSU on hand that could be swapped in, or consider proactively sending one there. If the issues don’t clear up, it’s one possibility removed from the list and you have a spare PSU on hand for when it does go bad. 

/dale

On Jul 13, 2025, at 14:57, Andrew Burwell <andrew....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All, I've updated to the new PHD2. Re-ran calibration last night using the assistants. Things started out well, until almost the exact same time and same issues tonight. I'll reiterate that this is a remote setup which has been running almost flawlessly for two years. So trying to track down the specific thing that is happening here so I can address it. In the last 3 months I did start to get random disconnects of the mount. I have the reconnect trigger for the mount to reconnect it upon disconnection. It could be related to this but not sure.

IN PHD2 I had the following warning: Guiding Stopped, the scope started slewing. In NINA I saw the attached screenshot with error messages. At 1:58 am there's apparently a slew or stop tracking that happened which caused movement during that 10 minute capture. Every capture after that there appears to be no tracking and every image looks like the attached. I've also attached the NINA log and linked the PHD logs.

https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_9Znc.zip

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/e304c975-8293-4d50-9a21-50497ec0b9b9n%40googlegroups.com.

<20250712-205233-3.1.2.9001.5956-202507.log.zip>

[Brian Valente]

Hi Andrew

I'm not sure what is the issue (Dale mentioned some things to investigate) but it is not originating in PHD.

PHD does not control the mount starting/stopping slewing, it is responding to external events. Your mount reports its status and if PHD sees it's slewing, it will stop guiding based on what you specify in advanced setting (typically 'stop guiding on slewing').

This can obviously happen if your mount is slewing, but can also be caused by large moves (such as a recenter or in some cases a very large dither)

Regarding your settling timeouts, what is the settle distance? With 5 second exposures, you only get a handful of tries to reach the settle criteria before you time out. If you are confident about your mount's performance you can relax the settle distance (knowing the mount will settle as expected), and/or you might consider a slightly shorter exposure of say 3 seconds and use the variable exposure delay setting, short = 0 long = 3 seconds. That way you'll get more settle attempts

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/e304c975-8293-4d50-9a21-50497ec0b9b9n%40googlegroups.com.