SharpCap Forums

Can we autoguide with Sahrpcap and Altazimutal mounts?

In theory it should work - I tested with a Celestron SE mount (although I did not test while tracking). Please post the SharpCap log and details of any error and I will see if I can work out what is going on.

cheers,

Robin

ok, I try tonight with Dob sync AZ.
my concern is that field rotation require multiple guide calibrations

Hi,

in the end, field rotation would mean that you would need to recalibrate, but I think up to about 20 degrees of rotation will be fine. Getting to 20 degrees will take quite a long time unless you are imaging near the zenith.

cheers,

Robin

I am trying autoguiding, but calibration failed with message" failed due to inconsistent angles from 0 axis movement (127 and 0.91)

Hi,

that message means that the directions that the image moved don't make sense to the program - for instance when it moved the mount Alt+ and Alt- the image didn't move in opposite directions.

Please can you post the full log after the problem has happened and screenshots that show the movement and scatter graphs and the error message (a good scatter graph should have four lines going in directions at right angles to each other)

cheers,

Robin

I have taken some print screen of the feature tracking log when trying to calibrate autoguide with my Synscan Dob goto and Skywatcher ASCOM driver.
the calibration failes every time. I have nevr fixed this issue with AltAZ mounts.

Thanks, those graphs are very helpful in letting me see what is going wrong (not sure what the cause is yet, but one thing at a time!)

What is happening is that the image is appearing to move in pretty much the same direction when SharpCap moves the mount both positive and negative in the AZ direction. This isn't good - SharpCap needs the image to move in opposite directions when it moves the mount in opposite directions, otherwise it can't guide!

The AZ- trace looks pretty much how I would expect it, but the AZ+ one moves off very quickly for very small mount movements, which is a surprise.

I presume that the mount was tracking before you started the attempt to guide? Did it continue to track reasonably during the calibration (other than offsets due to guiding commands) or did the tracking stop or not work correctly? Did the mount seem to respond in the same way to guiding in both the AZ+ and AZ- directions?

cheers,

Robin

the mount kept tracking during calibration, but the az* and az- appeared to move at different speed.

Any update about this issue?
I am wondering if this is a synscan driver problem, or something else.