STT 8300m FW8 STT and PHD Guiding

Discussion in 'Legacy Models - Community Support' started by Jason Wiseman, Sep 19, 2015.

  1. pfile

    pfile Standard User

    Joined:
    Oct 11, 2014
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    it does work - what was happening is that while most of the time a 3s guider exposure takes a total of 4.2s to take and read out, sometimes it takes 6, 7 or even 8 seconds. PHD2 has a timeout setting that disconnects the guide camera after it is non responsive for 5 seconds. that's the cause of the disconnect.

    this timeout can be increased and in fact the PHD2 authors told me to just set it to 60 or 120s, which effectively disables it. it's in the camera tab of the "brain" menu in PHD2.

    had an uneventful run last night which lasted 8+ hours.
     
  2. Kai Yang

    Kai Yang Standard User

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    Jul 7, 2015
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    I am not sure if I understand this correctly.
    I saw two CCD chips on my STT-8300, one on the main body and another small one on the filter wheel.

    I am also struggling with this.
    Cannot get PHD2 run with CCDopts or SGP...

    -Kai
     
  3. Doug

    Doug Staff Member

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    Sep 25, 2014
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    Yes there are two chips... but there is only ONE camera.

    You can't have two programs in Windows accessing a printer at the same time - the printouts would get intermingled. The operating system prevents that from happening.

    Similarly, the camera drivers are designed to avoid having two programs access the same camera simultaneously. The camera can't perform two commands simultaneously, even if the imaging chips are separate. The camera would get confused and possibly even lock up.
     
  4. Kai Yang

    Kai Yang Standard User

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    Jul 7, 2015
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    Doug,

    Thanks for the information.
    So MaxIm would handle this nicely?
    The price tag of MaxImDL is really high and hope we can get some discount for SBIG users.
    Otherwise we are getting a guiding CCD without 3rd party supporting software, that's really no good.
    Honestly, if I know this before hand, I probably will go for another CCD solution.

    I found an workaround by using "SGP API Guider" with PHD2 (and use SGP, which is the CCD control program I am using), but not sure how stable it is.
    If it is not working, I probably give-up the self-guiding ccd and use a separated guider.

    -Kai
     

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