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Old 03-07-2019, 09:17 PM
Startrek (Martin)
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Startrek is offline
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: Sydney and South Coast NSW
Posts: 5,990
Conditions looked great but PHD2 guiding poor

Last night I set up to image M17 as the forecast looked fantastic, no cloud , no moon , no wind and low Jetstream plus visually it looked really good , stars crystal clear and not twinkling
Located , framed and focused M17 at around 35 deg Alt , started PHD2 , auto selected guide star with SNR around 38 , calibrated ok , started guiding at 1.30 then went to 1.50 then 1.80 arc sec error with Dec graph looking ok but RA saw toothing around
Reduced Aggressiveness on RA from 75 to 60 and increased min mo from 0.20 to 0.30. Left Dec at 75
Fiddled a bit with Settings again but guiding didn’t improve
Shutdown PHD2 and restarted , auto selected a guide star again with SNR around 41 , calibrated again with no issue , guiding started at 1.50 then 1.70 then 1.80
Fiddled with minor settings again and eventually settled around 1.50 to 1.70 which is not great
I’ve had my HEQ5 mount guiding at 1.20 to 1.30 arc sec error previously
Started my capture plan 70 x 2 minute subs with dithering and guiding took a long time to settle even on a low Dither. Sometimes didn’t settle back to the error before the dither
I know I can send guide logs to PHD to evaluate the guiding but I’m thinking it was just “seeing conditions” last night that caused the guiding to be poor
I only had 2 bad subs ( star shape ) out of 70 with slight oval shaped stars, the rest were ok but not sharp and tight , a bit fuzzy
When I stacked the subs with my darks and processed the image it was terrible, a lot of noise , stars were not sharp etc.....
Then I decided to image Jupiter at around midnight with my 5 x powermate as I always do and could not even focus , the planet was just a fuzz ball , so shut down , packed up and went to bed
So forecasts and visual observations can be deceiving as it was suppose to be a great night but I had the worse night and a poor image
Did anyone else image in Sydney metro area last night ? Did you find imaging and guiding poor
Welcome any comments or advice
Cheers
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