Hi all
bearing in mind that there are many ways for the mount to become ‘lost’ during the night
e.g. cables pulling causes clutches to slip, sync fails on a solve since close to the meridian, power fails and mount reports its at home suddenly etc, which can cause blind solves to fail when in a dome, has anyone got recommendations how to handle this in a script or other process ?
There are two sides to this - detection and remedy.
Detection I guess is determining that blind solving is failing.
For my mount I have to force it to do a hard reset to the named home position and start again which would involve disconnecting everything, turning off the power and usb in particular order and then restarting.
Alternatively I could jog the dome around until blind solving succeeds and sync on that if the mount will accept a wildly differing sync point.
I’d like to detect and remedy this situation in dragscript.
What do others do ? Is a long walk to the bottom of the garden the only solution ?
cheers
Mike
Blind solve failing happens also if the solve system doesn’f find stars (fog, veil, cloud)… but the mount is in correct position. So detect this events is really difficult.
How to exit … If you have home just use it in DragScript (you do not need hard reset in this case for what I know), this only if the home is internal and the mount always know where to go also if its lost. Otherwise there aren’t any way that I know different from what you have wrote (usually manually move with a remote webcam and blind solve again on the sky).
This is what I was thinking. However I can tell the difference between blind solve failure for clouds and fog and due to imaging the inside of the dome because I can measure the sky brightness and temperature to get a fairly reliable indication of whether the sky is clear enough for a solve to fail. Of course I may still be looking at the inside of the dome.
On my EQ8, im running with hard home settings turned off due to using a tandem arrangement where the dovetail is rotated 90 degrees.
Where are the homing sensors on the EQ8? I recently set up an iOptron CEM70 for a friend and it threw us for a little as it would home to an incorrect position. On that mount it was possible to rotate the dovetail in 90 degree increments independent of the homing sensor. That meant if you had a side by side dovetail arrangement you could rotate the mount puck by 90 degrees to match the side by side saddle and seeking the home position resulted in the scope/s pointed in the right place. If you seek the home position, where does it end up pointed?
I reckon the ability to automate finding the home position is critical to remote operation.
That’s a good question. I have already turned the puck 90 degrees to try to get to this outcome.
I use eqmod to control the mount and have a custom parking setup at West side upright. I shall now investigate whether it supports a hard auto home.
Cheers
Mike
Home hardware is a features of the mount, usually premium mounts.
Do not mistake with a normal home from driver that can be based on the mount actual sync data.