DSLR settings
I had the rig out last night because it was a clear night for once. I decided that rather than trying to image various DSOs, I would experiment with camera settings to see how well Ekos could drive the DSLR.
Everything worked well for shorter exposures, but trouble arrived when I tried to capture exposures longer than 30 seconds.
The shutter would open, wait the desired amount of time before closing, but the image was never transferred to the laptop. Aborting the sequence left both Ekos and the camera in a strange state.
So I spent time this evening researching what was going on. The DSLR is new enough that it supports the “Bulb over USB” commands, so it wasn’t a camera issue.
Then I found a small blog post mentioning an Ekos option called “Force Bulb Mode”. It was set to “Off” in my configuration, so I changed it to “On”.
And what do you know? It all works now. I tried a sequence of increasing exposure lengths - all the way up to 300 seconds - without any problems at all.