PHD graph

[jgs001]

I found the graph in PHD last night... I've no idea what it's telling me, but is this good or bad ?

[Merlin66]

It shows the guide corrections being applied in RA and DEC, looks good to me!

[James]

Looks stunning compared to mine!

James

[Paxo]

Just alter the scale to 1000 James, it flattens out quickly then

Steve..

[jgs001]

Ah thanks Merlin... I see what you mean James... Steve's suggestion will work nicely ...

[RobH]

That shows good guiding.

The dotted lines represent 1 pixel, so you have very little movement.

Cheers

Rob

[Euan]

At least it doesn't look like this

[narrowbandpaul]

how do you get that graph in PHD.

the log file has loads of incomprehendable numbers?!

less than 1 pixel....good show

[SteveL]

how do you get that graph in PHD.

Tools -> Enable Graph

[blinky]

It's in the menu Paul - enable graph it's called.

BTW John that is a 'perfect' guide graph, from what I remember 0.30 is perfection!

[narrowbandpaul]

thanks...I dont remember seeing this in the menu.

i remeber seeing log....but not graph.

Was graph added in an update to the PHD software?

cheers

paul

[narrowbandpaul]

can you turn the guiding off, but still graph the results...to see PE in RA and polar alignment in DEC?

that would be interesting.....

paul

[jgs001]

Thanks for the info... Cheers Craig... I wonder how I managed to achieve that

[James]

Euan - you need to turn off the trance music Putting your iPod on the mount won't help either...

[roundycat]

Don't know about PHD but if the readout is in pixels you need to multiply out by the image scale to get a meaningful figure, ie, one in arc seconds. Don't forget to include guide camera binning.

Dennis

[Euan]

Euan - you need to turn off the trance music Putting your iPod on the mount won't help either...

I didn't think there was anything wrong with having a subwoofer in the obs?

[RobH]

can you turn the guiding off, but still graph the results...to see PE in RA and polar alignment in DEC?

paul

There's an option to disable guide commands. This is really handy for drift aligning, as the crosshairs stay exactly where you put them, i.e. on the star, and then you'll see the star drift.

I can't remember if it still graphs though....I think it does.

The graph option wasn't available in earlier PHD versions.

The OSC index shouldn't be taken as gospel.....I've had wildly different figures than 0.3 but still had perfect guiding, so don't worry about it too much. It's the flatness of the graph that's the important thing.

Euan, that graph looks like you have a mount imbablance, and you may also have the aggressiveness settings too high.

Bit of a black art though...I had big jumps in RA last night, even though I've not changed anything at all, and the last time out guiding was perfect. No idea why!

A couple of things to remember...

1. Recalibrate when you pass the meridian, or after more than a couple of hours anyway, as your calibration is only really accurate for the area of the sky you're pointing at, and orientation of the scope at the time, as balance will change slightly and this won't match the earlier calibration.

2. Once you lock onto a star and set it guiding, wait 5 minutes for it to settle down before imaging.

Cheers

Rob

[Psychobilly]

Pecprep is the tool you want to analyse your logfiles...

New things all the time in PHDGuide... 1.10.10 has star profiling autoguide star selection fix for the graphic bug... etc...

Make sure you get teh latest ver of pecprep so that it handles the logfiles from the later version of PHDGuide correctly... some problems with the "international" settings onthe logfiles from PHD meant that the older versions dosent read the laetst logfiles...

Peter...