Hi John,

The last two mornings I've come back to find CCDAP displaying 'Waiting for the sun to get east of the meridian'

I'm pretty sure it was there

I've attached the log. The other clue I have is when I started a test session just then it says it will start imaging as 08:42 29 Aug, but also says sunrise is 06:38 26 Aug - which may have been true, but it's not very useful!

Hmmm... maybe it's calculating the sunrise time, but not the date? - this session has been running for a few days now.

I'll try a few things tonight (including resetting CCDAP), but do you have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Darren.

ccdap20080828_215137.log (26 KB, 87 downloads)

Darren,

Did you have your lat/long correctly set in TheSky? If so, please post them so I can investigate. Basically the error message is saying the sun's azimuth, as reported by TheSky, is not between 0 and 180.

Hi John,

I restarted (but not reset) CCDAP last night and the problem occurred again this morning.

theSKY has my current location as 37deg20min N 121deg 53'W (San Jose, CA), but the ALT is currently (10am local time) -32deg

Restarting theSKY doesn't help. It seems very confused - it seems to have the right location, is using the computer time, but seems to think it's about 5 hours away. Still, that's not your problem!

I've attached an image of the status window. Please note the start of imaging and sunrise times.

Thanks,
Darren.

earlysunrise.JPG (99 KB, 18 downloads)

Hi Darren,

I tried San Francisco as a location here and all seemed to go properly. Do you have the time zone set correctly in TheSky? It should be 8.0 with DST set for US and Canada.

Hi Jonh,

I think I've worked it out. Somehow a different .sky file was created (called ExternalChart.sky) which has the right location and timezone, but gives the wrong UT and LST in the time window.

Switching back to normal.sky seems to get the sun back to the right place.

Thanks,
Darren

Good deal, Darren. Thanks for getting back. It had to be something like that

Hi John,

So the sun did come up this morning for CDDAP and theSKY! There was one small issue - there wasn't enough time to do the exposures within the exposure time limit ie "06:20:08 Too light"

This is fine, however CCDAP didn't shut down the CCD cooler, which it normally does when the flats compete normally. I don't think it hurts with my camera, but it was working really hard to maintain -20C by the time I noticed.

Thanks again,
Darrren.

please post a log.

Sure (attached)

Thanks,
Darren.

ccdap20080830_212044.log (65 KB, 98 downloads)

Hi Darren,

Based on your log, it doesn't appear you had cooler warmup checked. If you had, you would have seen this in the setup section of the log:

quote:

3. Shutdown tasks
Telescope will be re-parked after dawn flats are completed.
Cooler will be turned off.

That makes sense - thanks.