After all the hee-haw about getting SkyX to use Maxim for images, apparently I can’t actually use that to do the PEC training. Not sure where I had gotten that idea. So, fired up CCDSoft and used it to generate a trackiing log (with guider corrections turned off). 1 sec exposures, ran for 17 minutes or so.
Problem: there is a drift to the star, so it steadily drifts out of the track box. I don’t know how far out it can go – if it is out of the box, do we lose part of the image, so the centroid is calculated wrong? Or, does it actually “see” image beyond the tracking box?
So, when I load the raw tracking log into SkyX, I see
Hard to see the curve – Bisque picked some tough colors. The drift looks bad – don’t know why I would have this in the first place. When I hit the Fit button, the drift is removed and I get
Not sure what this means – do I have a net 6.6 Arcsec error? Or is the 3.3 correspond to the 4.4 pixel displacement on the axis, so I have about 2 racsec? I check the Last box “Periodic Error curve for TCS” and get
Downloaded this into the mount. Turned on “apply PEC”, and reran the tracking log to see if I get better PEC. The raw data looks like
Still a serious drift going on.
The fit data is now
Hmmm, it looks to me like the mount is worse with PEC running!
Repeat the process; also, I focus the star first. Now, the 3 stages look like:
Interesting, this curve is upside down from the previous one.
Oops – it looks like it is cloudy now – no stars showing up. To be continued next time….
Now, will the mount automatically use the PEC when it is turned on, or do I have to enable it every time?