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Autoguiding for Astrophotography


ASIGN_Baz

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It all depends on what you have in mind really. Plenty of excellent "astrophotos" have been taken on a simple tripod. However a guided mount can help you get closer in to the objects in the sky, and follow them too.

There is some great advice on the website for Stargazing live for simple astro photography, and feel free to ask whatever you like here, we will give you all the help we can :eek:

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I dont mean to sound stupid here...but if I am to do some astrophotography, am I going to need a motorised mount?

Robin

Unless you plan to do just star trails and very very short wide field exposures.

I would recomend you get your self a copy of 'making every photon cound' by stepenwolf here on the forum. It quickly gave me and many others a good introduction to the dark art!

heres the link Beginners guide to astro-photography

Good luck and keep the questions coming! :)

Michael

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So, I'd previously said "think I've got everything sorted, just need some stars to check things out". Well I got some stars tonight and everything is working except one small thing, PHD keeps loosing it's guid star after approx 2 mins (ok not a small thing then :)). I've not done any PEC yet, does PHD compensate for PEC or should I be doing it separately somewhere? Should I be setting backlash values using the HC or does PHD take care of it during calibration?

I've got EQMOD working & it can slew in all directions as can PHD manual mode so the cable must be ok. Also have Stellarium linking through EQMOD and it can goto selected targets.

Using the QHY5 on the finder scope, I've set PHD to use the settings in the screen shot below. Any settings there that I should change to compensate for the poor tracking? Also, can I capture PEC curve data for EQMOD to analyse using PHD?

PHDSettings.jpg

As always, I'm greatful for any help/suggestions.

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"on camera" ST4 cable, or ASCOM pulse guiding?

Using ST4. Interestingly I've had good results from ASCOM Pulse guiding (5 x 5 min subs on M103 with no obvious trailing) so if I can't sort PHD with ST4 then it's no biggy, would be interested to know though.

Ivan

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Another noob question, I afraid...

I have a standard Celestron 127 MAK with the goto mount as supplied. Can this be used to autoguide, assuming I have a guide camera or are the EQ5/6 the minimum mount that can be used?

Thanks

Steve

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if I am to do some astrophotography, am I going to need a motorised mount?

No.

I don't have a motorised mount and I'm able to produce astrophotos. There's techniques you can use against drifting images, such as stacking. Obviously for deep sky objects, you will need a mount as the objects will zip past your view in no time at all at high magnifications. But for stars, planets, constellations, stars and wide field you won't need a mount - but one would help for those long exposures.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I've upgraded my EQ5 with the Synscan GoTo upgrade from FLO. I've got PHD, EQMOD, EQAlign, EQDir adapter, QGVideo (with my QHY5), "Cartes du Ciel V3.0" all working with it with no problem. Though it's been a lot of reading & help from SGL members to get me there :)

In short, it works fine.

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Apologies if these are daft questions ....

1. I understand how GOTO systems work in that the scope is guided to the particular object you are wanting to view but do they also track the object ?

2. If a mount is motorised does it still need "guiding" software to track objects for astro photography ?

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Think of it this way.. tracking is "dumb" guiding is "intelligent"...

Guiding (at least autoguiding) uses a camera to provide a feedback loop to ensure that the the guide star essentially remains in a fixed position in the guidecams field of view... this largely cancels out any errors in the mounts "tracking"

Billy...

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Yorks, yes, and yes :)

Even very expensive mounts can require autoguiding software, but a lot depends on the focal length of the scope that you are imaging with, and the length of exposures you require.

Autoguiding software helps prevent any drift from centre as a result of imperfect alignment and periodic errors in the worm gearing.

HTH

Tim

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thanks for the replies. So if I had a scope with a motorised mount I could use something like stellarium to "guide the mount ?

You'd need an additional guide scope and camera that tracks a guide star while your main camera takes the images. There's lots of free software PHD for example that is used for the guiding.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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  • 1 year later...

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