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So, I went looking for something to help me plan my nights objects, and found this:


I selected Nebula and Comets (for chits and giggles) and then white background, and printed out a nice nights worth of targets to try for.
Mine worked great. The first 3 were below my hedge, but I found the Dumb Bell was favorably high enough to go for.

Then my guiding went in to toilet... :^(
Still had fun and learned some things.
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SonnyE


(I suggest viewed in full screen)

On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 10:21 AM, Arun Hegde wrote:

I end up with pointy projections

Sounds like my hair most days since quarantine....
?
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SonnyE


(I suggest viewed in full screen)

Wind, for me, does not often have a direct impact. I and my equipment are well shielded by the back block wall, and tall foliage growing on the wall.
I have a condo complex across a wash (ditch) behind me that generally is lit up like a prison. Highly obnoxious!
Since my wall is as tall as allowed, I have a living extension that is fine against city ordinances.
My "spot" is like a little hovel down in a protected area.

However, we get the Santa Ana winds whistling down here that do generate substantial static electricity do to their dry nature.
Last night was a very unpleasant time. ESD (electro-static discharge) actually caused my Gemini 2 to shut down when I put the HC back in the Velcro dots on the mount leg.
It was the same as if I had shut off the main switch momentarily. And wiped out my modeling I had just done. :^( (*^%$!)
And fortunately, my Gemini 2 was not affected. It protected itself from the anomaly.
I ultimately did some electrical bonding to get the mount, table, and myself drained of static build up. No more ESD after that. But I made sure to ground myself before touching the mount after that.

So today, I've been checking programs, updating, and running diagnostics. All appear to be fine.
Brian told me about how the Gemini 2 does a self check at start up, and since mine goes through that just fine, I have no reason to suspect any problems.

But wind can cause movement and vibrations.
A long time ago, and many bad pictures away, I discovered any movement near my equipment could easily effect my imaging. Much later, I was able to incorporate remote operation, and human induced vibrations became a moot point for me.
But we don't notice all the different things that can induce wiggles and jiggles into our imaging.
Solid Earth, simply isn't. There is a lot of ground vibrations, and wind is yet another PITA to deal with.

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SonnyE


(I suggest viewed in full screen)

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Found out how to submit bugs to indi. bug is here just in case anyone want's to see the dvd extras for the movie:

Brian,

What is your image scale (arcsec/px)??

With the wind, apart from the bloated stars, the bigger issue for me at my image scale (1.6 arcsec/px)? is the occasional gusts that will cause a big jump and I end up with pointy projections from my stars. If it isn't too many frames, I end up using Median combination in PixInsight which does a good job of rejecting them and still gives me a good integrated frame. I think your scale is much smaller than mine from the size of the nebula in relation to the overall frame.

On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 07:53 AM, Sonny Edmonds wrote:

I didn't know how to start an image. And in sequencing, I think the big arrow is supposed to start the sequence.
But mine is always grayed out, and does nothing.

you might appreciate some elements of SGP being more intuitive here :)

Thanks Justin,
I'm still somewhat baffled. But make progress like a snail... Thank You for the pointer about the Looping Images. I suspect you are correct. Any pointers as to how to turn then off?
As much as I find most manuals somewhat worthless, I think I need one. LOL!
My screens don't appear to be anything like the ones in Cuiv's videos. I'm running the latest updates and version in N.I.N.A. But my screens don't look the same in some pages.
And I haven't quite figured it out. But I am finding my errors in an eventual way. (Picture a snail crossing a boulevard to a new garden.)

Then last night, we had afternoon winds that died down mid to late evening.
I have my mount on 3 redwood board adjusters to get it level. I found when I went to stick my hand controller back on the Velcro, ESD (electro-static discharge) caused the Gemini 2 to momentarily shut off. (Surge protection, I believe)
Back to square one. I got a long electrical jumper and bonded my mount to my table (metal/glass), and started over.
It was the theme of the night, although I did quell the ESD, nothing seemed to work well after that.
Not my first time dealing with ESD, so I will wet down my area, and do more bonding to ground out any static electricity.
Sigh! Never a dull moment here. But at least Mr. Moon isn't the bother he was.

Not even my old method would work not last night/this morning. I'm going to work on my software today.

I will win. I always win. No matter how long it takes.
I have high hopes for NINA. Any pointers you might share would be greatly appreciated. (Like, How do you shut off that looping???)
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SonnyE


(I suggest viewed in full screen)

Hi Paul,

The only thing I can recall is that the time before last (i.e., the session before the one for which I posted the log), at the end of my imaging session, the ASCOM driver seemed to have trouble connecting to Gemini; it ultimately did end up connecting, and during the next session, it connected up just fine, but gave the errors noted in the log. I don't remember restarting Gemini. I should mention though, that for all the errors, the pulse guiding seemed to work just fine, the mount seemed to be responding to? PHD2 guide commands, so it didn't seem to me that the connection was lost for an extended period of time.?

Tonight I will reinstall the ASCOM driver and do a dry run and let you know how it goes. I'll also use a new ethernet cable as Brian suggested.

Arun

Hi Arun,

Thanks for re-posting the log. I see a strange error, and can't quite explain what I see. it appears that Gemini was in some bad state during the first part of the log: while there were communication errors, the retry logic produced unexpected results, as Gemini refused to synchronize UDP communications with the driver after a number of requests. There were a number of attempts to restart the communication, but after each one, Gemini sent replies indicating errors to the driver, which resulted in yet another attempt to restart communications. This repeated many times.

After the last time (did you turn off Gemini by any chance?) it looks like communication was established properly, and no errors appeared in the log after this.?

This is strange behavior, and something I've not seen before. Does this happen often? If you get Gemini into this state again, see if turning it off and on again will resolve the errors.?

As it is, it may have been a communication error that caused the initial condition, but the recovery logic didn't seem to be able to get the communications back on track, despite multiple attempts until the last try. At that point, everything worked perfectly.

Regards,

? ? ? -Paul

Sorry, Paul. Yes, I deleted it. But here it is attached again.

Don't see the attached error log, perhaps it was deleted? In any case, timeout errors in UDP log are not normal, these indicate lost or unprocessed requests which is a serious network error. While the driver tries to recover from such errors, the condition that caused the errors should be corrected, as this can result in erratic behavior and ultimately lead to a disconnect if the recovery logic doesn't succeed.

Regards,

? ?-Paul

Sonny,
The "big arrow" will be grayed out if you are looping images on the imaging tab. One thing to check. It's got me quite a few times. Overall, I find N.I.N.A. a great piece of free software.

-Justin

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Brian,

Attached is the debug log. There are several ethernet connection errors, for example, starting at?23:00:07.815. In each case, it reconnected. It is curious. I've never had it when I connected directly to the computer.

Dealing with June Gloom here.
It's hot, it's cold, it's foggy, it's misting, the apps are crap.

But there is a couple of thoughts that don't help:
If you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes and it'll change. For astronomers, usually for the worse....

Location, Location, Location... Sometimes we can change that, and find a different weather pattern.
Not necessarily a better weather pattern, but different than home. Spend the other half a tank of gas going back. :^(

You can't change the weather, only live through it, or change your approach. Solar imaging has a lot of appeal at times.
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SonnyE


(I suggest viewed in full screen)

Well, nope, never had something specifically a communications error.

I've seen a lot of things that were indescribably odd. And things that would break the will of strong men and make them walk away from Astrophotography.
But when such carp swims by, I have often just shut down, and started over. (The big reset) Go back to boot up.
Or shut down, then come back the next night when the square electron has gone away.
Glitches occur. Seems to be the nature of the sport. Millions of backyard astronomers, using billions of combinations of settings and all sorts of combinations of equipment.
Nope, there are no cut and dried solutions.
Dispite what the software writers may have you believe.

But when everything works fine, OH! What a feeling!

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SonnyE


(I suggest viewed in full screen)