Resolved AO-X Seems to be Dead Again

Discussion in 'Guiding and Adaptive Optics - StarChaser and AO' started by Mark de Regt, Jul 17, 2021.

  1. Mark de Regt

    Mark de Regt Cyanogen Customer

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    Hi,

    Once again, my AO-X is acting badly.

    All was well for several months, then suddenly my images were full of very oblong stars, all in the same direction, image after image, night after night. All possible adjustments were made to the mount, with no change.

    I was on the east coast, never awake while it was imaging, so I could not look at its behavior.

    I got home last night, and immediately saw what was happening.

    The AO will take a few images, then pause for a second or two, repeating forever. Meanwhile, the guide star is all over the place, often getting lost.

    Since I have seen behavior like this before, I thought the best thing to do was to exercise the AO, and see if that shows a problem.

    Alas, CCDOps pretended to be exercising, but talked about an AO-7; no motion was apparent.

    Deciding that perhaps that old program doesn't work with the AO-X, I kept the guide star on the guide chip, and told Maxim to calibrate the AO. It tried, but it repeatedly gave the error message that there was no movement in the X-axis.

    FWIW, it calibrates just fine with the AO not being used, and guides just fine with the AO not being used.

    Thoughts?

    Mark de Regt
     
    Last edited: Jul 19, 2021
  2. Colin Haig

    Colin Haig Staff Member

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    I always start with "What changed?"
    Any updates, cabling issues, mount maintenance, unusal rotation angle being used (cable tugging), power outages?
    Is this the STX-16803 driving it?
     
  3. Mark de Regt

    Mark de Regt Cyanogen Customer

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  4. Colin Haig

    Colin Haig Staff Member

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  5. Colin Haig

    Colin Haig Staff Member

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    BTW Mark, did you guys power-cycle everything?
    I had a fast look at SRO telemetry, and nothing stands out.
     
  6. Mark de Regt

    Mark de Regt Cyanogen Customer

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    I am pretty sure that I had power cycled it a few times, but, just to be sure, I did it this afternoon.

    Then I told the system to guide with the AO-X, and it's guiding just fine with the first image of the night (forced because of the big moon).

    I'll look in the morning, to see how it did for the night.

    Mark
     
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2021
  7. Mark de Regt

    Mark de Regt Cyanogen Customer

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    The three images are fine; let's stand down and see if it stays fixed.

    Thanks for your help!

    Mark
     
  8. Colin Haig

    Colin Haig Staff Member

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    Ok... keep an eye on it.
     
  9. Doug

    Doug Staff Member

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    Question: is the AO using the cable that came with it? We had an incident recently where they were using whatever cable was lying around, and it was long and had thin gauge wire. It didn't work properly because of the voltage loss.
     
  10. Colin Haig

    Colin Haig Staff Member

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    @Doug - that's funny - Mark was the guy that happened to. He's the "Original".
     
  11. Doug

    Doug Staff Member

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    Oh LOL, didn't realize that. :confused:
     
  12. Mark de Regt

    Mark de Regt Cyanogen Customer

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