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Guiding

dark knight

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dark knight

dark knight

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Hi all, now I'm sure one of you clever folks can help.

I have converted a 9x50mm finder scope into a guide scope, an Atik 1HS is used as the guide camera, PHD is the guiding software. Now I'm sure I've read somewhere about using a converted finder scope and that other forum members use this method. PHD requires some info about the guide scope and that is where I am stumped. In particular it asks for the focal length of the guide scope, so do I just measure from the front of the guide scope lens to the camera chip?? (sorry if this is a simplistic question with a simple answer that is going to make me look stupid but I'm new to guiding)

Also can anyone confirm the pin outs from the camera's parallell connector.

PHD is not guiding as well as I would have hoped, in fact I spent the whole of the last clear night messing around trying to get it sorted. I want to confirm I am using the correct settings, I know I have entered the wrong focal length for the guide scope (think I actually entered my imaging scopes focal length doh), does this make a huge difference I wonder.

Anyhow any help is much appreciated.

Cheers in advance to you kind folks

Carl

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jgs001

jgs001

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I don't recall giving PHD any info about the focal length of the guide scope. I did have to change the calibration step value from the default otherwise the motion that PHD used wasn't sufficient to move the stars far enough for it's calibration routine. I used 3000 for my 400mm ST80 clone... you'll probably need a larger number... but I think you'll have to try it and see what you need.

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dark knight

dark knight

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Thanks everyone.

I'm sure I had to enter some details about the guide scope, maybe I'm getting mixed up, will double check.

I tried a calibration step of 4000 John but found the star and surrounding box wandered off the cross hair eventually even though it successfully did the calibration routine.

Adam can you give me a run down of all the settings you use, this will at least give me a starting point. Do you monitor the guiding graph in the tools menu, I believe the OSC value gives a good indication of how good the guiding is. A value of 0.3 and 0.7 is supposed to good with the ideal being 0.5.

If your value is below 0.5 the correcting aggressiveness should be upped, If above 0.5 then aggressiveness should be lowered.

Thanks for your input everybody.

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adamsp123

adamsp123

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I will post a screen shot of my settings, caveat is I go through a Vixen starbook which has its own guiding settings 1 to 10 IIRC, I set both RA and DEC to 5 methinks.

Also make sure you have the scope well balanced and in DEC balanced with the scope horizontal AND vertical, also make sure there is NO tension in the cables to the webcam.

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jgs001

jgs001

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Carl, I bought one of the fttdi cables with a USB on one end (linked to from the eqmod site), and a weird connector on the other, then "bolted" on a piece of cat5 for the heq5 connection. Works a treat.

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dark knight

dark knight

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You guys rock, thank you so much for all the info. John - so you just cut the weird connector off the end of the fttdi cable and just join the resulting loose wires to a cat 5 cable to bypass the synscan handset. I was under the impression a super duper box of trickery was required. I will just need the correct wiring connections between the fttdi cable and the cat5 for an eq5 synscan goto,,,don't want to blow anything up..

Glider thanks for that, so I wasn't mistaken about entering the guide scope details or was I???

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Glider

Glider

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dark knight, as far as I know the mount is expecting TTL voltage levels. As far as I know USB or USB-RS232 levels aren't the same as TTL.

I've just done a quick Google on FTTDI. Using a FTTDI cable with a USB on one end and a piece of cat5 for the mount connection then I'd just check that the FTTDI is converting to the proper levels before I plugged it into my mount.

jgs001, I'm not doubting that yours works for you.

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