Guiding didn't stop after slew/park

[Kevin Quin]

Is PHD2 supposed to stop guiding when the mount parks?  I've got Stop Guiding When Mount Slews checked, but last night when the mount parked PHD2 kept searching for a guide star (which it wasn't going to find since the roof was closed).  Maybe PHD2 treats a park slew differently from other slews?

Kevin

[Brian Valente]

Kevin

Please upload your logs using the built-in PHD Log Uploader. 

On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 10:52 AM Kevin Quin <kevi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is PHD2 supposed to stop guiding when the mount parks?  I've got Stop Guiding When Mount Slews checked, but last night when the mount parked PHD2 kept searching for a guide star (which it wasn't going to find since the roof was closed).  Maybe PHD2 treats a park slew differently from other slews?

Kevin

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open PHD Guiding" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open-phd-guidi...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/7aabf74e-00f0-43c3-9365-2243b3bd80dfn%40googlegroups.com.

--

Brian 

Brian Valente

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

[Bruce Waddington]

PHD2 doesn't monitor mount states like tracking or parked and it doesn't know when the roof is closed.  All of that is the responsibility of the session manager app to stop guiding and get things shut down in an orderly way.  Or if you're not using a session manager, you have to do it yourself.  If the park operation resulted in a significant slew, PHD2 would have picked it up as a slewing operation but only if it was actively guiding.  But if the park was done "in place" or only had to move the scope a short distance, it could have gone unnoticed.  It sounds like you probably need to clean up your operational procedures a bit if you don't want PHD2 to keep trying to find guide stars.  And as Brian said, if you send the logs and also tell us when the scope was parked, we might be able to be more specific.

Bruce

[Kevin Quin]

The log is uploaded (I didn't even know an uploader had been added - very handy).  https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_bMZ3.zip  In the NINA log, the guide star was lost at  22:47:56.4266.

What happened is that the roof closed and PHD2 lost the guide star, but since it can take up to 60 seconds for the safety monitor to get the Unsafe notification, and NINA doesn't issue the park instruction until then, PHD2 was already reporting the guide star was lost.  If the park/slew took place at that point (it was a significant slew to the park position), is PHD2 supposed to stop looping, or is it too late since PHD2 has already lost the guide star?  The NINA sequence does have a Stop Guiding instruction, but the NINA log shows it was skipped since PHD2 reported as looping rather than guiding.  In the NINA log at 22:47:56.4266 there's a note that the guide star was lost.  The unsafe flag popped up at 22:47:58.7025 and the first attempt to stop guiding was at 22:48:00.3330.

Thanks for your help.  Stefan said he's going to add into NINA's Stop Guiding instruction the ability to stop PHD2 even if it's looping, so that may solve this.

[Bruce Waddington]

PHD2 doesn't pay attention to slewing unless it's actively guiding, generally meaning it's issuing guide commands.  So in a looping state, slewing will be ignored.  I think the change in the NINA stop-guiding instruction is the right way to go.

Bruce

[Brian Valente]

as an aside

>>>since it can take up to 60 seconds for the safety monitor to get the Unsafe notification, and NINA doesn't issue the park instruction until then, PHD2 was already reporting the guide star was lost.

If that's really the case, that seems like the safety monitor system could use some improvement. Typically if the safety monitor goes unsafe, I see updates in NINA within a second or two

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/461d7c6e-21df-4c69-8043-478a7795ee3fn%40googlegroups.com.

[Kevin Quin]

Well, I may have that wrong.  I'm still brand new to Starfront, so not sure how everything works yet.  In this case, it was only two seconds between the time that PHD2 lost the star and the Unsafe condition was logged in NINA.  Of course,  that doesn't include the amount of time it took to roll the roof.

[Brian Valente]

That makes sense: the safety monitor's reported unsafe condition is separate from the roof (i.e., 'dome') status.    

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/1e8b44f0-b8ca-4841-af0c-886781a23956n%40googlegroups.com.