Metaguide

[bottletopburly]

came across metaguide guiding software , has anyone used it , if so how did you get on with it , I also see you can collimate with it and it has a negative image feature allowing guiding on lunar features and sunspots .

 

[vlaiv]

Used it for a while, but for some reason gave up on it and started using PHD2.

Although you can see airy disk in short exposure stack, I actually never collimated scope with it. Just verified collimation to be good.

I think that main issue with it was that I was expecting too much out of short exposure guiding at the time and my mount was not up to it (plain HEQ5, no modding or tuning at the time).

After switch to PHD2 I just kept using that because I realized that guiding software is not "bottleneck" to my imaging performance and I kept improving mount rather than trying to deal with it by using different software.

[bottletopburly]

Cheers vlaiv , how easy did you find it to setup for guiding 

[vlaiv]

5 hours ago, bottletopburly said:

Cheers vlaiv , how easy did you find it to setup for guiding 

It was not complicated, I got it guiding on a first night. Almost plug and play.

I remember only one issue - was not sure about guide exposure length and guide command frequency. Can't remember what the issue was, except that I was confused what would be the best option for setting those two parameters.

[bottletopburly]

2 hours ago, vlaiv said:

It was not complicated, I got it guiding on a first night. Almost plug and play.

I remember only one issue - was not sure about guide exposure length and guide command frequency. Can't remember what the issue was, except that I was confused what would be the best option for setting those two parameters.

Cheers vlaiv

[michaelmorris]

I use PHD2 for guiding (so simple to use) and Metaguide collimation.