PHD2 guiding tips
I have been using PHD2 guiding on and off. Its a fabulous program and gives superior guiding. Its free and its sophisticated.
The guiding assistant works out the best parameters for your guiding for that night which is a great tool.
The only issue I have had it can lose a guide star and then it does not seem to try to continue and stops if that occurs and does not re-engage the star once the cloud passes like say CCDsoft will (it just simply keeps going until told to stop).
One solution I used now is 1) use really long guide exposures - 10 seconds or more. 2) I fitted a .6X reducer on the end of my SBIG STi guider and these 2 actions makes for a really high signal to noise ratio guide star usually.
But if it were slightly cloudy I would revert to using Sky X for autogudiing which is the same as CCDsofts.
I was getting .62 arc sec guiding last night for quite a while and then it went to .78. That graph was very flat and is the best guiding I have ever seen (AP1600GTO).
Greg.
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