Metaguide

[libraryman]

It was a clear but very poor night for imaging last night so i gave Metaguide a run for the second time!

i used my QHY5-Lii mono guide camera and to be be honest; if the numbers work out correctly, it is very good!!

With very poor seeing i was down at .5 RMS on average.

Initial set up needed care but it did a full calibration quite quickly, i just locked the star and off it went.

i took an image for 30mins and found no particular issues with it at all other than a rougher Dec axis (as shown in EQmod Pulse guide graph)  which the RMS # would suggest was o.k...this may be down to the aggressiveness setting which i left at the default 7 on both axis. 

Lots of info on the page, dithering was by Maxim script which is supplied by the software provider. 

Given the seeing, i thought the RMS looked very good and the image seemed to support it.

My guiding in Maxim was also good but the RMS was somewhat higher.

hopefully another clearish night tonight,  good enough for testing Metaguide and I'll feed back.

Ray 

[libraryman]

I said that i would give Metaguide another quick review: here it is.

I took several 20min subs on the soul nebula using Maxim as the guide software, with good focus i was seeing a FWHM of 4.1 +  or there a bouts.

Reverting to Metaguide and setting up the parameters, i saw a drop of FWHM to 3.6 for the same target and sub length.

initially these figures suggest that Metaguide does improve guiding performance though this can be influenced by seeing and other factors.

I used EZ planetary for the capture and in Metaguide 8 frames /sec with NF frames = 5....it has several features that match other software.

e.g. hot pixel removal, correction override etc.

The author has just released an updated dither script which appeared to work well in Maxim..used for capture.

no crashes or issues after following the excellent PDF guide.

because it uses a video stream, apparently it can have a high processor  usage but i did not see any issues that effected me.

Is it better than Maxim or PHD????...i find it as good and certainly just as easy to use...but the best measure of guiding has to be a lower FWHM and it did appear to produce an improvement for me.

whether over the course of time it proves it can consistently reduce the FWHM remains to be seen but initially; it look good.

I used it with a guide scope... on the basis of what i saw i am now going to try it on my QSI off axis...that should test its ability to find faint stars which i believe its very good at using the QHY5L-ii Mono

Ray 

[swag72]

So Metaguide guides through Maxim? 

[libraryman]

No it doesn't Sara, it is a completely separate piece of software, however it uses a script to invoke dithering (or you can do it manually in the programme) in Maxim which i was using for capture.

Ray