Planetary, Is guiding needed???

[Mav359]

i was doing a few tests with my new ASI 120mc (which i still havent had a chance to use) & without thinking i fired everything up, long story short the ASI works fine along side the Scope, focuser DSLR however once the Guide Camera fires up the ASI has massive break up of the video and the software has capture errors & this is just at the live preview stage.

I have no doubt that this is just a USB bandwidth issue but I find it strange because i can have everything working along side my QHY8L.

I am looking to upgrade the whole USB bus to USB3.0 anyways however in the mean time....

Is guiding neccassary for planetary imaging? they tend to only be AVI's of a short length at a high framerate, what im getting at is if i don't have to have guiding i can leave that camera off.

Cheers

[Zakalwe]

No, guiding is not required. Decent polar alignment and good tracking helps a lot, especially once you start using long focal lengths (think 5 metres and above) and of you are using mono.

Stacking software can cope quite well with a bit of drift, but its a bit of a pain in the bum if you re doing Lunar work and you lose a chunk of the image due to it drifting in the FoV.

[lensman57]

For what we image as a hobby guiding is not required. The tracking accuracy of the mount and the stability of the optical tube on the mount are the important factors. Your planetary software , Reg6, AS!2 etc are more than capable of centering and aligning the jumpy video.

A.G

[ollypenrice]

Even if you could guide (and it would have to be on the same planet, somehow) I think it would be a disadvantage. The great genius of fast frame imaging is that the target lands on different pixels many times per second, allowing for dither (and drizzle stacking) automatically. I would have thought that pinning the image onto the same pixels would be the last thing you'd want to do. This isn't my thing so I don't know for sure, though.

Olly

[Mav359]

Cheers guys

Ive done no planetary imaging at all yet so i wasn't sure.