Resolved AO-X Seems to be Dead Again

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

 

Nothing changed. Literally. Same two targets as before. One night it worked fine; hasn't worked since.

No cables tugging. Yes, it is the STX-16803/STX guider driving it.

This is the AO at work now:
http://www.de-regt.com/Problems/Odd_Guider.2.MOV

That is substantially identical to how it was in February when it had to be fixed:
http://www.de-regt.com/Problems/Odd_Guider.MOV

 

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

 

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

Thanks for your help!

Mark