Even since I started autoguiding, I've always had problems with finding a suitable guidestar to guide on, creating never ending problems.
So yesterday, after a long day working on my Observatory. The sky stayed clear, so I setup the scope and mount anticipating a great night for imaging. It was, the seeing was average but the transparency was excellent. The Milkly Way was stunning, the best I have seen from my location. I went through the normal procedure of Drift aligning, Star alignment, then setting up the lappy and thousands of cables. Once completed, I collimated my C8 and setup the camera. Focused both scopes and now I was ready to start imaging.
At first I wanted to image the Sculpter Galaxy but after about 20-30mins of trying to find a guidestar.... I gave up and decided to image an object with many bright stars. The Tarantula Nebula.
I got the Tarantula Nebula centered in both scopes and went to see if the guidescope had a star in the FOV. Nothing...... absolutely nothing....... I knew something was wrong as there was thousands of suitable guidestars in that area of sky. I started brainstorming what could be wrong so I went through a checklist. Is the cable connected? YES. Is the cap off the scope? YES. Is the guidecamera focused? YES.
From there I couldn't work out what was wrong. So as a last resort, I decided to start changing some settings on PHD. I clicked on Cam Dialog and changed the Gamma from 100 to 150. Nothing. I changed the Brightness. Nothing. Then I found the exposure setting which was set on -4 as default. I changed it to 2 from -4 and returned back to the main menu. I clicked on the live view button and waited. The first image appeared and I was blown away. About 50 stars appeared on the screen with the Tarantula off to the left.
I collected a total of 60 minutes of data on the Tarantula Nebula using 6 minute subs. PHD performed flawlessly and gave me perfectly round stars.
So at the end of it all, I had to laugh that one setting had caused so many problems and I shouldn't have blamed the guidescope and software for not working.
Phew!!! What a night!
