Starflyer

Peter Shah's star reduction is good

Guide rate in EQMOD set too low?

No word on this @Grant ? When I booked I requested one of these on the Oaks close to Lou and Ian in their caravan.

Your old, prolific chipset based cable no longer works due to a recent Windows update. There's an old thread somewhere on SGL that goes through a method of getting it working using an old prolific driver. I suffered with this a few years ago, I battled with Windows to force it to use the older driver, and gave up in the end when new windows updates kept on breaking it. Do away with the handset, grab a new FTDI based cable from FLO, they just work.

Have you ticked the box to see visually the corrections that PHD2 is making? With PEC off you should be seeing a lot more corrections than with PEC enabled. This is an easy sanity check that PEC is actually being applied. What algorithm are you using in PHD2?

That's driven by the current fad for CMOS cameras surely? It doesn't mean they're better than CCDs. I haven't been dragged in by the hype, the amp glow problems and the need to faff around with settings puts me right off. Why go for CMOS when CCDs are plug and play? A 460EX at under £1000 is a true bargain!

Are there tent-friendly hard standings in long meadow? Having used one of these for the past few years I can say they make camping in rainy / muddy conditions bearable.

I'm not sure this is true, can you quote a source where this is discussed? I thought the theory was to offset balance whenever you've got backlash. Surely there's backlash still present between the worm and worm wheel in a belt driven system, unless you've got a fancy zero backlash mount. Ian

I hear that v4 is due to launch in beta in the coming months, maybe worth holding off for a while.

I gave up trying to get mine working, it'd work for a bit and then the next Windows update would wipe it out again. Save yourself a load of pain and get an FTDI lead, they just work.

I use 0.3x with my 10" newt, my reasoning is that I wanted 'gentle' corrections as it's a big scope to move around quickly and it overshoots easily. 0.5 sounds good for your newt, maybe 0.7 for your frac. I believe the reason the lodestar should be binned is that it's an interlaced sensor. Each download at 1x1 only downloads every other pixel row, so if you have a star with the centroid over a number of pixels it will appear to PHD to jump around. At 2x2 you download the whole sensor image every frame, you're also getting less latency between what your camera is seeing and what your mount is doing.

Try setting your history to a lot more than 50 data points and your target to more than 100 data points. It won't improve your guiding but will give a better idea of what's happening over the full six minutes or more. As tooth_dr says, the shape of your target point spread should mirror what you're seeing in your stars. But over the 150 seconds in your history the RA and DEC RMS errors are equal, this should mean round stars. It is possible to get flex in an OAG, my SX OAG was useless to begin with, the stalk would rock back and forth. I fitted a tiny grub screw into the stalk holder and now it's solid. I'm not saying yours is the same, but something to check.

Is that from the newt, from the centre of the frame Craig? Asking as I don't see any difraction spikes. There's some elongation but it's not terrible.

You should be able to get yourself a second hand EQ6 Pro for £600. If you plan to image with the 200p, then you may struggle with the HEQ5 when you add the weight of camera, guidescope etc. I'd focus on the mount first, this is where you'll get the biggest improvement in your images for the money you spend. If you compromise on the mount and upgrade your optics at the same time then you'll see less of an improvement than just getting the best mount you can afford.

I used to use it, and paid for it. The author hasn't created this to get rich, although I hope he's getting some reward from it. It's an impressive piece of software and a massive amount of work has gone into it and it continues to be developed and improved all the time. It's a bargain at the price it is, comparing it to other software I'd class it's worth in the £100+ price bracket. If you use it, and can afford it, do the decent thing and pay for it, it's only the price of a few pints of beer.