feature tracking shows empty 'movement speed'

[nodustsc]

Hi,
I'm using an rst-135 to play with the feature tracking function.
I connected to the mount in ascom device hub and rst software showed everything got connected.
I launched sharpcap, connected the cmos and then started feature tracking.
The movement speed drop down appeared empty and nothing to choose from. I could start the moniotr, but it wouldn't allow me to do calibration and go beyond from there.

I tried both altaz mode and eq mode on my mount. I refreshed the mount firmware to the latest. the result is the same.


Thanks,
Chen

[admin]

Hi Chen,

can you see what movement rates SharpCap shows for your mount in the movement rate dropdown in the main mount control please? (https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.1/#Movement%20Buttons)

The feature tracking dropdown only shows mount movement rates up to 32x sidereal rate, so I think it's likely that your mount only makes movement rates available that are higher than this threshold. For mounts that allow pulse guiding, you would also see 'Guiding Rate' as an option, but you are not seeing that either, so I suspect that your mount does not make pulse guiding available to the ASCOM driver.

There is a previous thread (here : viewtopic.php?p=37705#p37705) on the RST135 that suggests that the lowest movement rate is 0.27 degrees per second, and that that rate is unreliable. I think that is about 65x sidereal speed, so would not show in feature tracking as it would probably be too fast for most use cases.

It might be that a firmware or ASCOM driver update from the mount manufacturer could provide more movement rates - only having 3 as mentioned in that other thread is certainly rather limiting.

cheers,

Robin

[nodustsc]

Oh, I missed the setup step in the setting menu.
Now it works and shows 20x, 0.42 deg/s, 6.2deg/s. Thank you, Robin. The online help is a very good read. Will test further when the sun rises.

[nodustsc]

I made it work for the first time but have struggled to reproduce the successful steps.
My setup is still an altaz mount and using ROI (upper right corner of my CMOS) to do full disc imaging. My polar alignment is decent and the drifting is fairly slow. At least it's far better than the first time I made it work.
My target (sun) is fully within the fov. I enabled 'use center of mass' but I couldn't see the center cross any more. I recall I saw it before.
If I check 'move center of mass to image center' in the guiding tab when guiding, the target would jump and the ROI is moved to upper left corner automatically. Does that mean the checkbox forces the use of upper left corner, instead of using the current ROI area?
My imaging train is better in certain corner so either I fix that or the software could help me avoid the problematic corners. Is it possible?

My sharpcap version is the latest. Thanks for any advice.

[admin]

Hi,

the center of mass indicator uses a sort of mid-grey colour on mono cameras, so it can appear to vanish if the target is about that brightness - if you turn up the exposure to overexpose the target then you ought to see it.

I'm puzzled by the ROI jump, unless you have the 'Use Camera ROI' option selected for movement. Even then, it should move the ROI to the area containing the disc, unless it perhaps gets confused by camera flip settings that are in use?

A screenshot showing the problem might help, as I am struggling to understand exactly what is going on I'm afraid

cheers,

Robin