FreeLists / az-observing / [AZ-Observing] Guiding Problems

[Stan Gorodenski <stanlep@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Schur, Jon, Rick, and anyone else with significant _experience_  
guiding for imaging or for whatever reason:

I am having a serious problem guiding using the Meade DSI Pro I, the 
current version of Envisage in the Autostar Suite, my 16" f/10 Meade 
LX200R,  and a laptop about 1 year old that has XP Pro on it. The 
project I am involved with does not allow me to track with the camera 
that is taking the image. I am tracking off reflected light that goes 
through a 50mm focal length doublet before it hits the chip on the DSI Pro.

I have had so many problems that I have the laptop solely devoted to 
guiding only, but I still am having problems. The guiding will sometimes 
freeze and when this happens I have to go out of Envisage and then go 
back in and re-establish the guiding. Last night it kept loosing itself 
and started rather quickly going off in declination directions. I have 
played around with the software anti-backlash adjustment (setting it to 
a very low percent should help reduce corrections in declination, which 
I do not need for what I am doing, when guiding ), the Guide setting as 
a percent of the base rate, the correction-gain setting, increasing or 
decreasing exposure time which will increase or decrease image size, and 
probably other things I have done that I cannot remember now. At the 
time I thought I was making progress, but last night showed I was not.

Can anyone with experience guiding offer some insight into what I can do 
to correct this problem? Is Envisage difficult to use for guiding, 
should I go to a separate guide scope with different software than 
Envisage, etc. I suspect part of my problem is that the reflected image 
I am guiding off is too large and atmospheric turbulence is causing the 
guider to get lost. I am thinking there is a compromise between going to 
too small a guides scope and one too large. Too small will not give the 
guiding accuracy needed, too large will introduce too much atmospheric 
turbulence. These are just guesses.
Stan
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