Observatory profile

[Joe Morris]

I’m trying to trouble shoot the error message in ACP, “The object is below the minimum elevation for the observatory.” Does ACP Planner mess with any of the location or time settings on file for the observatory in ACP or MaxIm? I notice in the created plan header that has a “;” in front, the observatory longitude should have a negative sign. I have no idea how this Planner observatory profile came to have the location in the first place, and I can find no way to edit it. The UTC offset is correct in Planner preferences.

[Bob Denny]

I’m sorry I missed this. Did you figure it out? If not I’ll try to help.

[Joe Morris]

I believe this problem, “The object is below the minimum elevation for the observatory,” is more related to the failed pointing exposures with the ZWO camera. Working on that.
Joe

[Bob Denny]

Joe -- I'm missing a lot of data. Is this a problem in an ACP run? For a sanity check, look at the Latitude/Longitude of the observatory in ACP (Preferences, Observatory). West longitude is negative. Also look at your system clock. THen look at the Right Ascension of your target. The Local SIdereal Time (LST) is the Right Ascension of "directly overhead", the meridian. So your target's RA needs to be certainly within 5-6 hours of the LST, more like within 4 hours for it to be usable. Also look for a "low" declination.

Attachment 15401

You can get the J2000 coordinates from TheSky directly if you set it up to show J2000 in its status bar. Here is a video that might help:

[Joe Morris]

Bob -- I appreciate your concern and lengthy suggestions. I think the error message was related to not being able to plate solve the ZWO images. As you saw, I posted the problem in the MaxIm forum and got some suggestions from Colin. I'm still working on a solution. When I use my standard imaging train, QSI 683 camera and Lodestar autoguider, I'm having zero problems with ACP runs. Personally, I don't think the combination of MaxIm and ZWO cameras are ready for prime time automated programs like ACP. If I use SharpCap software which uses the native ZWO driver, I have no problems but I can't use SharpCap with ACP since MaxIm uses the ASCOM driver

[Bob Denny]

OK Joe, thanks for letting me know. The first place to go is ZWO.

[Joe Morris]

Bob, I plan to contact ZWO but could you help me describe to them what type of image ACP calls for during a pointing update exposure? If binning is the problem, can I change that?

[Bob Denny]

If you have an ACP run log, you can see the binning that is chosen. It is based on your focal length, and tries to get to 4"/pixel. It will be 2, 3, or 4. This discussion has wandered all over the place :-) This conversation is all over the place. Recently we've found that at least one ZWO camera is being shipped with a default bias/offset that results in a huge black-level pedestal, with bin-4 completely failing due to all pixels being max white ("black" level 65536). Try setting your offset/bias to 1 or 2 and see if the solving problem goes away. However I am running on almost no real information here. I suspect there are several unrelated problems that are being conflated.