Jamie,
What I saw after setting PEC to "replay" in the GeminiII web interface was large jumps in RA and DEC.
PEC only affects RA, so that you saw large jumps in Dec also indicates that the auto-settings were not optimal.
That said, after programming PEC, you should always measure PE again with PEC enabled in PEMPro. This is necessary to confirm that the PEC curve is working. Also, note any changes to the amount of drift with PEC enabled. If drift increases substantially, that can have a negative effect on auto-guiding.
Also, decide on a guide rate and stick with that rate (I recommend 0.5x). Changing the guide rate after having programmed PEC can introduce RA drift.
-Ray Gralak
Author of PEMPro
Author of APCC (Astro-Physics Command Center):
Author of Astro-Physics V2 ASCOM Driver:
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jamie Amendolagine
Sent: Friday, December 11, 2020 2:19 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Losmandy_users_io] PEC training
Autoguiding was worse.
There are so many variables with autoguiding that it's hard to tell what is going wrong, at least to me. So last night I
was primarily interested in capturing SII data to complete a set of three targets before the rains come in. My secondary
goal was to further an evaluation of PHD's new "multi-star" feature. Finally I wanted to test out the PEC training that I
had loaded.
1: So I got an awesome set of SII images. Primary goal achieved! Here's the first target processed:
2: multi-star was doing great. I was getting one of the best sessions of guiding ever, yay!
3: enabled PEC in the mount to see if there was improvement. This one, not so good.
What I saw after setting PEC to "replay" in the GeminiII web interface was large jumps in RA and DEC.
I am using the PEC algorithm in PHD and I'm thinking that the PHD2's PEC training that I did without enabling PEC in
the mount may have caused the bad results. I'm not sure how to clear PHD's PEC training, so I just set PEC
aggression to zero, and reactive aggression to 100 for over 10 min after enabling PEC in the mount. I'm not sure if this
re-trained PHD.
Like I said, PEC wasn't the highest priority item on my list for the night. If it was, I would have cleared out PHD data,
and created a new profile etc from scratch with PEC enabled in the mount.
Jamie
