Sequencer / Guiding Anomaly

[AstroChessPilot]

Over the last few observing nights, I have noticed that dithering was not taking place. When I start live stacking from my sequence, PHD2 does starts guiding normally. However, under the guiding tab, guiding status shows not connected. I also have only stack when guiding is active selected.

If I manually execute the steps that are in my sequence, guiding and dither function correctly.

It seems that there is something wrong with my sequence. Robin, could you please take a quick look when you have some free time.

Thanks, Tom

Sharpcap - 4.1.11003.0
PHD2 - 2.6.11Dev6

[admin]

Hi Tom,

I think what is happening is that your sequence is triggering the connection to PHD2 and internally the sequencer remembers that it did the connection to PHD2 - all good so far.

Then, when it gets to the live stacking step, live stacking is happy because PHD2 is already connected. Still good.

Then the sequence finishes, and the sequence engine has remembered that it made the connection to PHD2, so it shuts the connection down, leaving live stacking without a connection any more.

One solution would be to put a 'disconnect from guiding application' in after the 'wait until guiding is active'. It may seem counter-intuitive, but that steps shuts down the connection to guiding created by the sequencer, meaning that

a) live stacking starts it again when it is activated and
b) the sequencer doesn't try to shut down the connection when the sequence finishes.

Basically, it's best to either let the sequencer handle all the guiding, or (if using live stacking) let live stacking handle it all. If you try to mix the two then you have to tread carefully.

cheers,

Robin

[AstroChessPilot]

Adding the "disconnect from guiding application" to the sequence did the trick.

Thanks!

For what it's worth, I add the guiding steps to my live stacking sequence because I kept forgetting to start guiding.