I finally have my new STXL camera with self guiding filter wheel up and running, or so I thought. Self guiding was working well tonight for a few hours, then the filter wheel CCD seems to have died. I have tried every combination of things to get it going again, but no go. I am not getting any images from that CCD. The main camera works well. Running The Sky X Pro on a 64 bit Windows 7 laptop. Any advice? I really don't want to have to send it back to SBIG. My rig is useless without it. $30,000 of dead metal.
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I have done all the usual things, i.e. check cables. reinstall drivers. The guide camera remains dead, no signal. The main CCD and filter wheel work fine. At your suggestion, I opened the filter wheel and looked it over for loose connections and cold solder joints. I am uploading a photo of what I found. The photo quality is not that good as I do not have quality macro equipment. The shiny solder at the connections makes it almost impossible to avoid saturating the photo. The leftmost solder connection on the ribbon is different than the others. The connection is surrounded with a whitish deposit that look like too much flux , or corrosion of some kind. The plug in connector at the other end of the ribbon also has a suspect joint, but I was not able to photograph it. Please let me know of the next step. Thanks rick
I have the camera working with the autoguider using the latest drivers. It's quite a pleasure. Thank you for your support. One thing, TSX has an autodark function which I prefer to use rather than taking separate darks. I live in such a light polluted area, precision darks are of little use. The problem with the auto dark is that the guider pauses while autodarks are being integrated and downloaded. Say for 5 minutes, without an extremely good polar alignment, the camera is off target and the first part of the next exposure in a series is messed up by all the necessary guiding corrections.
The guide camera shares some of the electronics with the main camera. Even so, in theory it should be possible to run the guider during a main chip dark frame, but that definitely won't work on all SBIG models (some have the guide chip behind the main chip's shutter, for example). As a result most software vendors disable guiding during dark frames to avoid problems. You could check with the authors of TSX to see if they're willing to try it.
