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

[Stan Gorodenski <stanlep@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Jon for your advice. It worked like a charm tonight. Guided for 
at least an hour and a half and no problem.
Stan

Stan Gorodenski wrote:

>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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