Hi,
I have been happily guiding with the lodestar for sometime but have switched to guiding through a smaller focal length guidescope (Orion mini guider - 162mm FL) to guide my 900mm fl main scope. To be honest it does seem to be working with the lodestar but I wanted to see if the ZWO 120 MMS would give even better results due to its smaller pixel/higher resolution - just wondered if it would improve the accuracy of the corrections/guiding.
With the lodestar I don't use the ST4 port because mine has that rubbish white cable with pins the size of gnat's teeth and of course if falls out if there is a slight breeze in Singapore
So, I'm pulse guiding via EQMOD.
I have never used a webcam before for astronomy and I really don't know how to make it actually work! I have the driver installed etc and PHD 2.6 will connect to it if I choose the ZWO option in the camera choices. I then use the brain to calculate the step/ms as usual and set the exposure time to 2s I couldn't see anything - completely white even with the gamma display slider turned right down. If I changed the exposure to 0.2s I saw stars. I was concerned though because I have also believed that anything less than about 2 seconds leaves you chasing seeing - but this is a video camera so I thought perhaps it works differently somehow. I selected a star and told PHD to calibrate. I can't remember the error but it was almost immediate and said something iike the camera didn't take a 2s exposure and stopped or something. Someone told me I would have to click the advanced camera settings and change the frame rate as it would be 60fps or similar, but that button ius greyed out - perhaps because I wasn't connecting with the ST4 port?
I found ZWO instructions online but it was based on a much earlier version of PHD when there was no ZWO camera option.
So, please if anyone uses this camera for pulse guiding or ST4 guiding with the latest PHD please let me know what you had to do to get it working.
Cheers,
Chris