windows desktop magnifier

[Uranium235]

Hiya,

Just made this useful (but obvious) discovery, so I thought it might be useful for others who hadnt considered it before when trying to focus your guide cam through PHD.

I didnt even know it was a part of Vista until I looked on the off chance. I will try this out tonight to help focus the ST80 (since PHD has no zoom function), that should get me some good pointy stars to guide by.

It goes up to 16x but I dont think I will need any more than 5x, anything past that gets a bit blocky.

[astromerlin]

Yes a very useful tool. I discovered it a couple of months back in WinXP and I use it to magnify the FWHM in Metaguide.

Did I feel a fool realising that I'd been trudging back and forth for the past year peering through the window of the porch where the laptop is to check and adjust things.

[themos]

It is said that defocused stars are better for guiding. The idea is that if you defocus, the light spreads evenly around the middle so that no pixels are saturated which enables the calculation of the centroid to be more robust.