star not moving enough; failed RA calibration

[Bash]

Hello team, Hope you are all well. I would appreciate your advice on this problem that I had yesterday night. Guiding has been working really well for me until I wanted to image M81 which was more or less at its zenith. As you can see from the log files starting at 23:18 onwards, guiding calibration failed after repeated attempts, even after moving the mount so that it no longer had to point directly above, but at an angle. Tried both the positions from either side of the mount as well. After a while it started to guide (may be this was an extension of the star test, but not sure), but as you can see from the attached image it did not go anywhere either.  Not sure what caused this and would really appreciate your help.

https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_x6T3.zip

 Thanks

[Bruce Waddington]

Hi Bash.  There’s not a lot I can tell you about this because I know nothing about what mount you’re using and you haven’t configured an ASCOM mount connection in PHD2.  As a result, neither PHD2 nor I have any idea where you were pointing when these calibrations failed.  A likely source of the problem is a bad guide cable but there’s really no way to know.  In the last calibration you tried, the guide star actually reversed direction during the west moves, so that’s another clue that the guide cable is perhaps damaged.  You also need to be sure that none of the cables are binding in the pointing position where you were trying to work.  Again, if you take a little time and configure an ASCOM connection to the mount, life would be easier.

 

Regards,

Bruce

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[Bash]

Hello Bruce, thanks for getting back to me. first off an update -  I had the same issue last night- happened again when the scope rotated to the left side of the mount ( usually the way the mount is positioned, most of my targets are acquired with the scope rotating to the right side of the mount and never had any such problem, so I am guessing this is something to take into consideration). Same error message- star did not move enough. I then googled this error and there was a suggestion to the adjust the calibration steps value in the "guiding" settings. So I ran that and the calibration step automatically changed from 298ms to 750 ms and immediately the problem was gone and had excellent guiding for the rest of the time with error rate below 0.35 secs. So I am guessing this was the issue. the mount is HEQ5 and have attached the guide log here (from 22:26 onwards). Could you kindly point to where I can get information on configuring an ASCOM connection?

Thanks

[Bruce Waddington]

You can start with the PHD2 manual – take a look in the ‘Mount Selection’ topic:

 

https://openphdguiding.org/man/Basic_use.htm#Mount_Selection

 

You should also read the material on the ASCOM web site so you can develop an understanding of how the software interacts with applications like PHD2.  The ASCOM mount driver you should use is EQASCOM and once installed, it should be configured according to this guide:

 

https://github.com/OpenPHDGuiding/phd2/wiki/EQASCOM-Settings

 

When you have the ASCOM components installed, use the new-profile-wizard in PHD2 to create a new equipment profile for your ASCOM-connected mount.  Don’t try to manually modify the configuration you’re using now, that will just create problems for you.

 

The EQMOD/EQASCOM mount driver is used by hundreds of people so you can find lots of online resources for help if you need it.

 

Good luck,

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[Bash]

Thank you, thats great!

Kind regards