PHD guiding question

[Keithp]

Hello All, hope you had a nice Christmas and New Year.

I've finally got my set up working. 250px mounted on eq6 syntrek, Celestron 102mm Wide View guide scope side by side with the 250px. Orion Starshooter guide cam connected st4 to the mount and usb to laptop. Running the standard phd guide programme that came with the guide cam.

I've been out the last 3 nights, in -6/7C temperatures and managed about 2/3 hours max before everything froze over.

Now the question. I'm finding it quite difficult to get a nice dark clear picture on the phd software, I've had to turn the gain down to about 25% on the guide cam before I've got something resembling a little less than a snow storm. I've managed in that to lock onto stars, well a star that appeared in the fuzz but it was not as distinct as I was hoping it would be. I've moved the focus on the guide scope back and forth until the blob was at it's smallest and I've activated the guiding and it did appear to work, I could hear the mount motors pulsing.

Is the lack of a dark screen due to the full moon at the moment causing too much LP? or is this normal, I remember when I was initially setting it up a few weeks ago that the picture was quite dark with no snow/interference (similar to what you would get with an out of tune analogue tv). At that time though I was running the software on my other laptop with larger screen and resolution. Could the problem be related to me now running (in the short term until I've replaced the panel on the other laptop) on my smaller asus laptop?

Regards

All

Keithp

[blinky]

What was the exposure of the guide cam? I do suspect it was due to the full moon and also if you have a lot of snow on the ground it will reflect a lot more of the ambient light up into the night sky.

[Keithp]

Cheers for the reply Blinky, do you mean the frequency of capture setting, if so that was on .2

If there is a seperate exposure (iso?) can you say where that is?

There was no snow on the ground, only a hard frost I was looking at targets to the north away from the moon.

Only just started using this setup so I'm still getting used to it, well as much as you can at these temperatures, after about 2 to 3 hours everything had frozen up so not getting much time for fully testing.

Regards

Keithp