Things I learnt last night: Newbie guiding...

[frugal]

Up until now I have been limited to 2 or if I am lucky 3 minute exposures, and even then I have to throw away half of them. So I took the opportunity to go to IAS and buy a guide scope and camera. It turns out that if you want a high end Newtonian, or a shiny silver refractor then IAS is great, if you want a cheap guide scope, not so much. The long and the short of it is that I left the show with a business card from FLO with an instruction to email their support guys to get a detailed setup defined.

It turns out that despite everyone at the show recommending Off-Axis guiding, you can not do it with an ED80-DS and a DSLR because there is no spare spacing between the field flattener and the DSLR in which to insert the OAG. So it was back to plan A and a separate guide scope.

Yesterday a nice big box arrived and I spent the evening putting it all together: ST-80 guide scope, Lodestar X2, Dual ADM Saddle, Celestron extension tube and a longer dovetail for the ED80-DS so I can balance it without needing to tape a bag of pennies to the front Unfortunately the only thing that FLO were out of stock of was the mounting bar for the ST80...

Task 1: replace the short dovetail bar on the ED80 with the new longer one. Turns out that it not as simple as I thought. Despite both bars being Skywatcher, the way the scopes fit onto the bars is different and the bolts from the ED80 bar are too short (and the longer bar does not come with any bolts). Ok, so the ED80 stays on the short bar with the bag of pennies.

Task 2: somehow bodge the ST80 onto the mount without having the appropriate dovetail bar. I now have a spare long dovetail bar, so I try to attach the ST80 to that. The only way that I can manage it is to unbolt the tube rings from the mounting block and bolt them onto the dovetail, which is not ideal as they are both threaded and it is very difficult to get them fully tight. However I have managed to get it good enough to try out.

Task 3: Install the camera drivers. I have an old Toughbook running XP which I thought might give me problems, but the Lodestar drivers and software installed perfectly first time.

Task 4: Install PHD. This was a bit more problematic. I tried PHD2, and it installed fine, but gave an error on running. A few minutes Googling revealed that this is a common problem with the MS Visual C++ runtime. Solution: uninstall PHD2 and the runtime and download a fresh version of the runtime pack from MS, then re-install PHD. Hurrah it works!

Task 5: Wait patiently until nightfall, whilst constantly watching the clouds... We did see the ISS pass overhead at 10:15 which was pretty amazing.

Task 6: focus the lodestar. After a lot of swearing and fiddling with settings in PHD and the lodestar software, I discovered that I can only get it to focus if I use the ST80's 45 degree piece and the Celestron extension tube. Right, focused...

Task 7: Align the mount. Polar alignment looked good. But the 2 star alignment with Vega and Dubhe kept claiming I was a whole degree out in Azimuth... Hmm. after 3 times of trying it I decided to see what happens if I just used it anyway.

Task 8: slew to M101, my current target of choice. Nope, the mount was consistently way off target. even after trying to realign it.

Task 9: Give up on M101 and go back to Vega as I know the mount can find that, and I just want an image, any image at this point.

Task 10: Try to figure out why PHD is not guiding. I turn on guiding and it claims to be calibrated, but the graph just keeps getting further and further out. After some frustration it turns out that although it claimed to be calibrated, it had never actually performed a calibration step. Find the "force recalibration" check box. Watch the pretty yellow cross hairs move around as it correctly calibrates. Look at the pretty graph that has a guiding error of less than 1 arc second consistently.

Task 11: Take a 10 minute photo just to prove that it all works. (remembering to actually take some flats this time).

Task 12: Fiddle with image in the morning and upload to AstroBin. Realise that I was not targeting Vega, but instead I was targeting 13-Lyr nearby.... Oh... Well that explains the poor mount alignment then

Despite the trials and tribulations I managed my goal for the night, which was to get a guided image. I just need to work on my star identification

[glowingturnip]

doh, Vega's the big shiny one mate  ;-)

congrats getting the guiding working

[wuthton]

Sounds like a frustrating experience but if it's any consultation, pretty normal for a first night.

It's usually plain sailing from now on, just the occasional night of computer crashes and poor guiding performance for no apparent reason.

To achieve focus with your guide cam you can extend with a cheapo Barlow with the lens removed.

[brantuk]

The guiding looks good to me - congrats!

[leelee970]

Good write up, sound like a normal night for me.

I have to say I like to test things out during full moon, at least I may have a chance of seeing what I'm doing wrong when it's not so dark, lol

Lee

[frugal]

doh, Vega's the big shiny one mate  ;-)

It has been so long since we have seen the stars around here I had quite forgotten