SC-3 Long

I ran into another problem last night.

I successfully calibrated the mount in both the Guide tab and the AO window using Bin1, however, the mount bumps seem to be in the wrong direction. Once the guider starts to bump it quickly drives the guide star off the AO window. This is happening in the Y axis. I don't know if the X axis is similarly affected. I suppose I coud set up an experiment to determine.

If tonight is useable I will try the Reverse Y axis and see if that solves the problem.

I really don't like the algorithm being used for brightness display in the AO window. Any star much fainter than 10m (exceptionally bright in my 22" system) is almost impossible to see until the autodarks are taken. Also, the software has a bad habit of not locking onto the brightest star in the field. This becomes a real annoyance when I can't see the stars anyway until after the darks are taken. It also likes lock onto noise instead of stars even though the stars are way brighter than the noise. Again, until the autodarks are taken you can't tell what it has selected. This would make it impossible to guide using any sort of automation if I was so inclined. The algorithm used for my old ST10 worked much better.

Seems like ther may be some bugs to work out.

 

The 45 degree thing is while doing the AO calibration not the mount callibration. The little X is at 45 degrees. The L from mount calibration is normal to the edge of the field sinee I am at 0 degrees PA for the guider.

At my 3100 mm FL there is not much chance of unwanted stars entering the field even if I didn't check for that first.

 

The AO and the SC3 are in line with each other using the supplied holes. I'll see if I can get a screen shot. It doesn't seem the affect the guiding.

 

Here are a couple of related images.

One is the AO and its relation to the SC3 since you asked about it. You can see it is a normal connection through the supplied holes.
The other is the AO calibration window showing the X at 45 degrees.

I tried the Reverse Y, It didn't work. I verified that MDL can move the mount in both the Observatory Window and the Guider/Move window. All 4 directions worked in both cases. I expected they would since I have been using MDL with this mount for many years.

I looks like the AO mount bump isn't working for me. It appears that there is no movement of the mount. It worked fine with my ST10/AO8 on v6.30. Unfortunately, when I upgraded to v6.40 for the AOX/SC3 install, it wiped most of my AO settings so I am not sure they are quite the same as they were before.

While was messing around with this stuff MDL crashed. It did not leave a log. After restarting it I noticed that the memory useage is continually increasing. It started at about 350Mb and now it is up to 770Mb in use. Could there be a memory leak somewhere?

 

The camera is square to the SC3 or as square as my milling machine can make it. The pickoff prism is on the short side of the main image chip as is usual.

I do not have a rotator yet. Probably will get one next year sometime.

 

For the connection between the SC3 and the AOX I used the gender changing cable that you guys supplied. It is wrapped around the camera to keep it out of the way.

Getting the view down the camera with only two hands was a neat trick.

 

Ok. I pulled out the cable. The weather is predicted to be bad for the next week so it will be a while until I can test it.

 

Testing tonight. Lots of wierdness.

The evening started off with MDL losing connections. At various times it lost connection to either the main camera or to the mount. Once it just lost control of the camera temperature setting. After closing and resstarting several times it eventually calmed down.

I was trying to calibrate the AO and was getting no motion in either axis. I eventually found that by loosening the screws on the DB9 connector to the AO it started working. It is not first time I have had something like that happen with DB9 connectors.

I was getting strange results from Nudge which is usually pretty reliable. A couple of times it would move the mount and continue to show slewing status even though the mount movement was done. If I hit the Abort button it would go back to normal. Another time I told it move 1 min West. It moved a couple of degrees. Then I told it to move 5 min West and it moved 3 hours West. Never had that happen before. I also got a couple instances of the Observatory Window losing connections where all of the values in the Status window would be blank. That problem has been happening for years so it is not necessarily a new issue. Sometimes I could fix it by Disconnecting the mount. Ususally I have to close MDL and restart it.

I had 2 crashes. Once MDL just went away while I was doing something in the Guide tab. No error messages. The other time it hung. Each open window went "Not Responding" as I clicked on it. It did not show "Not Responding" in Task Manager. I had to use Task Manager to kill it.
When I restarted MDL it had a garbage number in the Scope Dec field on the Guiide tab. I closed MDL and restarted it. Then Scope Dec showed -90. Closed and restarted MDL again and it finally showed the correct value of 17 where I actually was.

If I use the Guide tab the guiding seems to be ok at 1 sec exposure or as ok as it can be with not very good seeing and a 3m FL. If I use the AO to guide I get occasional extreme instantaneous excursions. They typically go to the edge of the guide box (I am using 32x32) and back to the center about as fast as I can see. It seems to happen whether I use 1 sec or 0.2 sec exposures. This doesn't happen wiith the Guide tab so I assume it is some weirdness in the AO. Eventually the guide star will quickly either go out of the guide box or to out the edge and stick there. If I stop guiding and re-locate the star it will usually show within 1-2 pixels of where it started even though the AO window shows it at the edge of the guide box.

It is only 11:30. I wonder what other interesting phenomena I will find before the night is done.

 

I haven't had clear sky to test since doing the chkdisk, DISM, and SFC that you suggested, but I wanted to say that I see the same jumping around of the guide star that shows in Martin's video.

 

Here is the About and DL Config data. Upload says "Catastrophic Failure" when I try to upload the Settings file.

 

Oh well. Tried it again and it worked this time. Who knows?