Hi, My sessions the last several nights have been marred by the camera not downloading an image that has completed, freezing the camera. And that's the end of image-taking. If I'm awake when it happens, I reset, and it works again, for a while. Then it happens again. Interestingly, it will shut down just fine; neither the camera nor Maxim freezes. Last night, it happened as I was almost finished with dusk flats (8:30 pm PDT/0330 UT), and again when it was trying to download an image at about 01:43 PDT/0843 UT. Interestingly, it took dawn flats after that, but would not take any more real images. Any help would be appreciated!
I gather from the log you are running SBIG w/AO? Are you running this through the MaxIm DL UI or through a control program such as ACP?
ACP disables automatic download so that it can start slewing to the next target before starting readout. Historically speaking there have been some issues with this. Make sure all of your software including MaxIm DL and ACP is fully up-to-date. If you still have trouble check with @Bob Denny for possible solutions.
Mark — Since this “just started happening” please save your MaxIm Configuration and your ACP Profile before making adjustments to the settings in either. You’ve been running successfully for a long time and have acquired many images. Don’t “lose the recipe” changing settings in an effort to restore successful operation. Something changed. We need to find out what it is. Once you have saved your successful settings, look at ACP Preferences, General tab, Disable slew during image download. Is it already set? If not, set it to on/checked and see if that helps. I’m going to guess that a power supply is going soft.
It appears to have done something somewhat different last night. But the good news is that it doesn't seem to have choked on a download. It started taking images at about 11:21 pm PDT/0621 UT. Each image was 1800 seconds. It took and downloaded four images, ending at 0827 UT. Then it stopped taking images, until dawn flats, with a number of plans failed. Looking at the ACP logs (attached, along with the Maxim log), it appears that it may have failed the plans because it wasn't getting weather data. If so, I don't know whether that is an ACP problem or an SRO problem; I'll ask the guys at SRO, but I would appreciate your thoughts, Bob. Mark
You’re correct. SRO uses a “shared file” to deliver weather info including safe-unsafe. It is their responsibility to make sure that the info there is fresh. ACP checks both the file date/time as well as the “time last updated” data within the file, to assure the weather data is not stale. If it is stale, ACP declares unsafe weather in order to protect your equipment. In your case SRO opens and closes but ACP still needs safe/unsafe to start/stop observing.
I should mention that DIffraction has in the works a new Boltwood Cloud Sensor that speaks Alpaca SafetyMonitor and ObservingConditions. No more having people locking and reading a bleeping file, and maybe one tenant keeping the lock for “a long time” That may be the cause of your observing lossage.
