phd and qhy5 help please..

[andyhicks]

Hi,

Despite the weather report showing clear all night after spending a while setting up for my second go at autoguiding, just about got ready to take some test shots and the clouds came. Two attempts at autoguiding, failed.. alomost a carbon copy of my last session only batteries let me down that time! it is what it is, Im used to it, would be nice to finally get to ONE sub using guiding though!

The cloud was patchy so I tried to use my guidescope,qhy5 and qgvideo to capture jupiter. Im still learning the ropes with the high frame rate camera and ive never imaged a planet before but i was trying all ends of the gain slider and it was always overexposed. I took a short video and viewed it back, for a start jupiter was way off centre, though it looked centred in the live view! I could see jupiter and 3 moons but jupiter itself was just over exposed as i thought it would. anyone know what I should do? If im totally honest i dont understand the length slider, is this the same as frame rate? i played around with it a lot though will little sucess.

another question i have is regardinga drift align using phd graph. I tried to follow the steps I've read about but when it came to watching the dy line on the graph it was going up and down, I was expecting it to go in one direction and to adjust in alt until the line smoothens out but I had no chance, I tried a tiny adjustment on the mount and the graph went nuts. Anyone know what went wrong? It was all balanced and as accurtely polar aligned as I could. I stopped dec guiding also.

any help or pointers appreciated

thanks

[martin_h]

Cant help with the gqvideo, but the PHD drift align..... the line will sawtooth across the screen, thats to do with the seeing as its following the star, what you are looking for is a general drift up or down over time, adust the mount to get a sawtooth that is following the centre line wth no drift.

[andyhicks]

Ah ok thanks Martin, that helps! Ill have another go next time out! I was looking for an obvious drift and the seeing wasn't great that night either. I think it's going to be more fiddly than I was hoping for, As much as I resist Its looking more and more likely I'll be going the ascom route, then I can use align software, it's just a case of getting an eqdir adapter.

Am I wasting my time with qgvideo? I dont find many people using it when Im internet bashing, sharpcap seems popular but I didn't have much luck with the qhy5, maybe I should try again and get rid of qgvideo?