Lesson Learned - PHD Guide Scope Camera

[Stickfarm8]

I learned a painful lesson  (in terms of lost imaging opportunity!) regarding the image camera on my mount and thought I would share my rectal-cranial inversion experience. 

The guide camera is an Orion Star Shoot Autoguider Pro in a Orion Deluxe Mini 50mm guide scope.

At the time I was using PHD2 V2.2. I wanted to "tweak" the focus a bit before I got started image capture.  When I started trying to autoguide after image selection, it would appear to start ok, then the RA and Dec curves would diverge. After trying a number of things, I gave up and packed everything back in the house. The next afternoon I went to the PHD2 website, downloaded the newest version, 2.6.6, and installed it. Since it seemed to take all the information from the previous install, I thought I was all set.

Nope. Same result.

I tried running the guiding assistant and accepting its recommendations. Still no joy. Finally I clicked on the option to reset configuration on the global tab - which reset everything, rebuilt the darks, etc., went thru the calibration process, and bingo. 

Apparently without realizing it, I must have rotated the camera more than a few degrees when I was fixing something that wasn't broke. There is a nice download  - PHD2 Best Practices written by the developers that was helpful. Page 8 discusses when to recalibrate.

So I lost two nights of imaging, but learned a valuable lesson - and even read thru the manual for PHD2 which was well worth the time spent. It is well written. 

Having the autoguider and PHD2 working properly is so important.

Rich

[Kev M]

Been there...done that....lol

I actually took my guide camera out to clean it, and didn't recalibrate afterwards.

Obviously PHDs idea of up/down and left/right did not match the new position of the camera.

If I had sound activated it was probably screaming...