Plate solving inconsistency - STILL

[William Bristow]

Hi Christian.

Bob is away until Wednesday, 5th March.

I see in the log that plate solves fail right from the first autofocus run, does your telescope have a very large focus change with temperature?

I found that the first autofocus run of a session would often report plate-solve errors and autofocus failed because the focus point when the telescope ended the last session in the very cold early morning was very different to the focus point when starting the session the next evening in warmer conditions.

For a while I manually focused the telescope at the beginning of the evening session before starting up ACP and FocusMax to ensure the focus was good enough for the first plate-solve and autofocus run, eventually I set up FocusMax to use temperature compensation and now FocusMax always adjusts the focuser according to ambient temperature before plate-solving and beginning the first autofocus run.

The other thing I notice in the log is that ACP (or FocusMax?) is selecting the blue filter for plate-solving during the autofocus run, is that a real necessity or a configuration error?
I’m not sure the blue filter is the best choice for plate-solve and autofocus for an RC optical system and I would have expected luminance, or maybe red, to be the right choice for plate-solving the initial telescope position for autofocusing.

If nothing above is relevant can you provide some sample .fit images from the run that failed to solve, I don’t think there’s much else can be learned from the log alone, also the .fits headers can be checked to see if they have the right pixel size and binning information which PinPoint needs for a successful plate-solve.

William.