Guiding with FireCapture v2.4 - Solar System

[Droogie 2001]

Has anyone had success with Guiding within Firecapture v2.4 on solar system objects?
Last night I decided to test out my new ASI 120 camera on the moon.

Now I will mention that Alignment process I chose was a basic one in that I simply selected Alignment, Solar System and selected the Moon. I did not perform a two alignment or polar alignment etc.

Once the scope was in place I decided to test out the camera.
As expected as the lower resolutions the view was drifting quite a bit so I thought I would hook up my scope to the laptop and used the ASCOM drivers, Fire Capture recognised the mount correctly.

I clicked Auto guide box and a red cross appeared but that was about it. The green arrows did flash N,E,S,W occasionally  so it was trying to maintain some kind of control.

I amended some of the settings but in all honestly I was not sure what they need to be set to.

All in all in didn’t work well. Now it may have been due to the basic alignment I performed but I was hoping it would perform a little better.
Going forward I want to guide with the planets so it is something I want to try and resolve.

Does anyone have any tips please?

Thanks

[Guest]

Hi,

Simple answer is, NO you can't guide using solar system objects, they are far to big, you can only guide on stars, it is as simple as that

Sorry but it is as simple as that

Olly

[Droogie 2001]

Ok thanks. I thought I had seen videos with someone guiding on Jupiter. Oh well never mind.

[Stargazer33]

Hi, you are also asking a lot of your guiding software having done such a basic alignment. Guiding is to help keep your object in the field of view once you have done a reasonable job of polar aligning. Guiding is not designed to be used instead of doing a polar alignment. I know this from experience of not doing a full alignment myself. In short guiding isn't a 'magic bullet'.

[teleskopjo]

I guess the OP was referring to this

[jimjam11]

I have successfully guided on Jupiter with firecapture. To get it working I had to increase your the correction time value to 1000ms for ra and Dec. anything less didn't move enough and 2000ms made it move around too much. With this setting firecapture kept Jupiter dead centre for 60mins plus for me. I then used the autocapture function to take batches of 60s movies until my laptop was full!

[jimjam11]

That was with a solar system alignment, so without guiding corrections were needed every 30s to keep Jupiter in frame (roi)

[JamesF]

Hi,

Simple answer is, NO you can't guide using solar system objects, they are far to big, you can only guide on stars, it is as simple as that

Sorry but it is as simple as that

Olly

FireCapture does have support for a mode where it attempts to use the position of the captured image in the frame to guide the mount and stop the target drifting out of view.  It's perhaps not guiding in the sense that people might recognise it for DSO imaging, but I'm fairly sure that's what the OP meant.

James

[Droogie 2001]

Thanks for the update. I thought I had seen someone guiding on Jupiter. Good to know its an option as sometimes when I do planetary imaging I cannot perform much of an accurate alignment do to my location..

[cgarry]

FirceCapture's guiding will follow a planet but does not work on lunar or solar surfaces.

However, I am currently in conversation with Torsten about reusing some of PIPP's surface stabilisation code to allow FC to guide on lunar and solar surfaces.  I should really get off my backside and make the required code changes so that we can move this forward!

Cheers,

Chris

[MattW]

Hi. I'm also a newbie when it comes to guiding. I'm very excited at the possibility of using Firecapture while imaging planets.

I have what is a very basic question. What cable do I need to connect my laptop to my G11 for this purpose? Do I only need the one cable?

Your help much appreciated