Hi.
Last night i got to do some testing of my future observatory, and ended up with some questions. My observatory is not yet build, so i carried everything outside and fired up my Odroid with INDI server at the remote location.
Some info on hardware.
CCD = Canon EOS 550d + Equinox 80
GUIDER = QHY (Orion Star Shot Autoguider) + Orion mini guider
Remote server = Odroid C1+
Home Workstation VM with 4 cores 4GB memory
Local network on remote and home location is cabled gigabit.
Remote speed from isp is 300 / 300 Mb/s
Home speed from isp is 75 / 15 Mb/s
As i want to control my telescope from "home" at a "remote" location i opened up a ssh tunnel to home (from the remote location) and opened a vnc session to my linux pc running KStars and Ekos. Then as i normally would do i opened a ssh tunnel from home to remote and started indiserver on the remote odroid. At this point everything worked fine. The vnc session would use mostly upload bandwidth in home, and download in the remote location, so it should not significantly affect the performance of KStars and indiserver.
First thing i did was to slew to m66 group and start the alignment module in Ekos. Note that my settings on the ccd and guider is "upload client"
The alignment module did solve when Ekos got the image, but it took 12 minutes for indiserver to download the image from remote to home.
1# Not sure how it could be that slow? (i did start indiserver -vv, but that cannot be the reason?) Should i not use "upload client"?
Also when the image solved i got the message "Reported focal length is 500mm, but solver calculated it to 625mm"
2# How did this happen? I have a
SkyWatcher Equinox 80 APO PRO that is 80 / 500mm. I do have a "non focal reducing field flattener" but it should have no effect on focal length.
At this point i figured that some things would have to be sorted before i could control the observatory from home. I disconnected from home and connected to the indiserver on lan, and tested some more. The only issue i had from this point was getting a guide star. I tried auto select star in the guidemodule and it always selected a spot that seemed void of stars. After some attempts calibration ended in success, but would loose the guide star after a while. I tried selecting a very bright star, but i think it was a white pixel, because the guiding was only using input in one direction and the graph went off the scale. Increasing gain only gave me more noise, mostly rectangular lines. I have guided successfully with this setup before, but using a ST80 as guidescope.
3# So what are sane settings for the qhy? Should gain preferably be as low as possible, and how long exposure can i use when guiding?
A lot of beginner questions here, but have not had many occasions to test this winter. If i dont figure out 1#, i will have to consider having a simple desktop with KStars and EKOS on the remote location, so there will be cabled lan between KStars and indiserver.
