Ao-7 Will not hold its chosen star

[marlin]

My AO-7 works fine in Maxim when I do one click at a time between finding a star and starting to guide. ACP loses my star at that moment, it turns tracking off in The Sky and the star drifts from the square before it can get established as guidestar.
How do I fix this to get AO-7 to work as well as the off chip guiding has always worked?
Marlin Costello

[Bob Denny]

Marlin -- I'm not too clear on your question. If you have changed to an AO (and is it truly an old AO-7?) the guiding settings in ACP need to be adjusted as well. In ACP Help, Auto-Guiding Your Mount, the second half of that page talks about how to set up for AO guiding. If you've gone through that and are still having problems let me know and we can go from there.

[marlin]

When my ACP, using Maxim and SkyX with SBIG ST-10 and A0-7, finishes flats, focuses, finds the target after plate solves, and begins to find a guide star for the AO-7, (All wonderfully done up to now) it often turns off tracking in SkyX and gives me a streaked small image in its finding a guide star mode. Then it is unable to select a guide star for AO-7 guiding and generates a number of log messages. This happens even if SkyX keeps tracking. I will include my log and plan.
I can observe the finding guide star small image but I do not see star selection nor a frame with the guide star in it. What am I supposed to see as the star is selected? The Maxim window shows the tabs changing from acquiring a star to guiding on a star but no image in either frame.
Marlin Costello

[Bob Denny]

Your log shows that guiding is disabled.

...
04:49:40 Initializing AcquireSupport V7.0.4
04:49:40 Telescope is ACP->Meade 16" f/7.5, driver V2
04:49:40 MaxIm DL/CCD is version 5.24
04:49:40 Imager is SBIG Universal
04:49:40 Autoguiding is disabled
04:49:40 Calculated unbinned plate scales (arcsec/pix): H = 0.61 V = 0.61
04:49:40 Calculated field of view (arcmin): H = 22.2 V = 14.9
...

That setting is in ACP Preferences, Guiding tab. Also make sure you have the Adaptive Optics checked.

ACP will not find the guide star for you, you need to use a field of view indicator or some way to know how far yu have to "fudge" the pointing of your target so you get a guide star. It's probably going to be tough if you don't have a rotator unless you have a wide field of view.