PHD Brain settings for finder / guider

[earth titan]

I've been using PHD for a while with an 80mm f6 scope for a while with good success. I now want to move over to a finder guider to save weight.

Anybody suggest any settings which can improve guiding in such a setup?

[jnc71106]

Increasing the calibration steps is a must somewhere around 3000 to start with

Possibly change the min pixel to 0.25 as well I think not 100% on that one though been a while since I used a finder guider

[r3i]

Increasing the calibration steps is a must somewhere around 3000 to start with

Possibly change the min pixel to 0.25 as well I think not 100% on that one though been a while since I used a finder guider

Sounds like a good plan to me.

[swag72]

Here's the settings I used with sucess with my finder guider

[earth titan]

Perfect. Thanks folks.

[ronaldo999]

I would second increasing the calibration steps, has always worked for me

[Bizibilder]

Yup - shorter focal length of scope = longer calibration steps and vice versa. Otherwise pretty much the defaults seem to work. There are a couple of good tutorials on the web, sorry i don't have links, but one is by Greg Marshall "A Guide to PHD Guiding" and the other by Neil Hancock in Starklabs Yahoo Group, dated 5/20/11. Both are based on the same basic information but each does have its own individual useful bits within the text.

[r3i]

Yup - shorter focal length of scope = longer calibration steps and vice versa. Otherwise pretty much the defaults seem to work. There are a couple of good tutorials on the web, sorry i don't have links, but one is by Greg Marshall "A Guide to PHD Guiding" and the other by Neil Hancock in Starklabs Yahoo Group, dated 5/20/11. Both are based on the same basic information but each does have its own individual useful bits within the text.

I think this is one of the guides you're referring to - not sure if you'll need to be a member of the StarkLabs group to get access to it: A Guide to PHD Guiding.

I've also read in various places that you should aim for calibration to occur in around 15 steps. How absolutely criitical it is to achieve this, I couldn't say.

[OzDave]

I've also read in various places that you should aim for calibration to occur in around 15 steps. How absolutely criitical it is to achieve this, I couldn't say.

I think it's a matter of striking abalance between taking too long to complete calibration and having enough steps to generate a statistically meaningful average of the movement response to each calibration guide pulse. In this respect it is a bit like stacking subs. The more you have, the less noise there is but it will take you longer to get them.

In PHD, calibration will fail if it doesnt move the star by 25 pixels within something like 50 or 60 steps.

So I reckon around 15 steps is a good balance.

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