Help with Lodestar Live

[kerrylewis]

Can anyone help in my attempts to get going with Lodestar Live?

The best I've been able to achieve so far is some stacked images of random stars at longer exposure times.

What are the settings to achieve a real 'live' view to enable focussing and alignment? I have not been able to see anything in the 'Focus Alignment Framing' mode.

Can anyone list the correct settings for this 'mode' - then I might get started?

Thanks

Kerry 

[HiloDon]

Hi Kerry,

I think your problem may be with the white and black level settings. First, turn off stacking. Then align on a bright star. I usually keep it on the last alignment star. Install the camera and go into exposure control. Set a fast exposure time and hit the green go button. Then go into Display Processing. You should see a spike in the histogram toward the left side near the black level line. Adjust the white level way to the left toward the spike and your unfocused star should appear. Get it focused and increase the exposure time, so more stars will appear. The fainter stars will give you better focus and you can expand them to make them bigger for better focus or you can use the focus alignment framing to help with the focus. Once you have focus, you're ready to go. Slew to an easy object and try 10 or 15 seconds. That usually gets you to see something. Then you can try longer or shorter times to get the best image. If you need really long exposures, like three minutes, you may want to use sum stacking. Just remember if you go to a new object to shut off the stacking and renew the frame.

Not sure this is the best way, but it works for me. Paul may give some better approach if he sees this. I'm sure he knows the best way to do it, he wrote the program.

Let us know how you do and if you need more advice.

Don

[kerrylewis]

Thanks Don

As you've seen in the other thread, I got similar advice from Martin and I began to get results.

Thanks very much for your help. I've seen some of your images which look great and hoping to get some of my own when skies permit

Thanks again

Kerry

[Paul81]

Glad you got up and running Kerry - looking forward to seeing your results.

At some point I'd like to do a few video tutorials and post them on youtube - I thought this would be best done when I am pretty much happy with all the user controls.