Auto guiding help

[Cancington42]

I just recently got an eq5, skywatcher 150mm (750mm FL on full frame) reflector and the orion magnificent. Set it up, polar aligned with the polemaster, then found the object i wanted to photograph, loaded ph2 version 2.6.4, picked a star and set it to start guiding. At first there was no read out in the history, but i heard corrections being made. I took a 4 minute exposure and there was a lot of streaks, gave it a minute, same thing. In the history panel things began showing up, but was all over the place. I stopped the guiding, and went without which ended up being 2 minute exposures with an iso of 1600. I’ve attached a screen shot of the last thing on the computer. 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

thanks!

[kens]

The pause before guiding was PHD2 calibrating. The error message shows that the calibration was faulty. Please post your guide log for analysis of the problem.

Note that PHD2 cannot work properly without a good calibration

[newbie alert]

That looks like the drift align feature rather than a calibration steps...guiding won't be happening in either function as it switches off guiding..

In the bottom right corner where it says CAL is it green or red? It won't guide until the calibration steps are done..

Guiding looks like this

Also on your image you have the guide camera on 1 sec..id suggest somewhere between 2.5 and 4 secs..they say your fighting the seeing otherwise

 

[Cancington42]

Thanks for your help guys! I’m going to give it another try tonight if i get a clear night, and take your advice.

[michael8554]

The star profile has a flat top indicating it is saturated - let phd autoselect a suitab!e star in Tools menu.

As mentioned Calibration was not optimum.

Once that's sorted use the Guide Assistant to give you settings for min move, aggression etc.

Most importantly, you need to read the user guides........:-}

Michael 

 

[Cancington42]

i had another chance to do some imaging tonight and setup with the auto guider based on advice mentioned here. the Cal sign in the bottom right turns yellow, and gives an error. i've polar aligned using the polemaster, and tested it to be true over the course of several hours. please refer to the first post for a list of the equipment being used. 

i've attached two images showing the main screen after running for a bit, and another shot of the calibration data. i took the screen shots after everything was disconnected.

even though it doesn't look as smooth on the graph as it probably should, i was able to get 4 minute exposures with solid tracking, but i heard a lot of corrections taking place in the mount and it sounded a bit off. the night previous when i had not used the auto guider i set the exposures to 2 minutes, and upon reviewing them there were 2/3 of the images were slightly off and lost pinpoint stars. i'm totally new to this, but i figured if i had solid polar alignment that a 2 minute exposure would be a piece of cake for the EQ5 with a 150mm reflector. am i wrong in thinking this? 

i read online that it might be something to do with backlash compensation, so i checked my setting and RA and DEC were both set to 0. i then set each of them to 4 arc seconds based on what someone had mentioned in a forum elsewhere. is this an appropriate value to use for backlash compensation? would this setting cause issues with auto guiding?

the temperature outside while working is about -5 Celsius, would the temperature have something to do with pour tracking, and guiding?

i hope someone can give me some advice as to how to approach this. 

Thank you for all your help!! 

[kens]

You'll find the guide log under Documents\PHD2 - please post that. Screen shots are pretty useless for any detailed analysis.

Your calibration shape looks fair but it is taking too many steps. Calibration stops at 50 steps and you've got 56 in RA. Did you use the calculator on the guiding tab and did you enter the focal length of your guide scope?

If you don't have a good calibration PHD2 cannot work.

[SAW]

On 11/02/2018 at 08:33, newbie alert said:

That looks like the drift align feature rather than a calibration steps...guiding won't be happening in either function as it switches off guiding..

In the bottom right corner where it says CAL is it green or red? It won't guide until the calibration steps are done..

Guiding looks like this

Also on your image you have the guide camera on 1 sec..id suggest somewhere between 2.5 and 4 secs..they say your fighting the seeing otherwise

 

Is that your guiding ? Looks good.

[michael8554]

newbie alert

Your RA corrections appear to be continuosly see-sawing up then down, it might smooth out if in your case you upped your min move  ?

Michael 

[Cancington42]

10 hours ago, michael8554 said:

newbie alert

Your RA corrections appear to be continuosly see-sawing up then down, it might smooth out if in your case you upped your min move  ?

Michael 

Yes, already established, new to this.

thanks for the advice! I’m not quite sure what setting you’re talking about, can you please specify what setting you mean?

thanks!!

[newbie alert]

15 hours ago, SAW said:

Is that your guiding ? Looks good.

Think that was on my avx which I did get down to 1.12 rms.. . I've done 1.09 so far in the cgem but think I can do better than that..

[newbie alert]

15 hours ago, michael8554 said:

newbie alert

Your RA corrections appear to be continuosly see-sawing up then down, it might smooth out if in your case you upped your min move  ?

Michael 

Thank Michael..think that was on my avx..( I just showed it as a e.g to compare with the image shown)

 I've not dabbled with the settings,just run the guiding assistant and applied the settings