PHD2 - Auto Select Guide Star and Star Profile Tool
I've been using PHD2 now for nearly 3 years without out too many issues and I've never used the Star Profile Tool on the Display. Don't ask me why but I've always manually focused the start field by line of sight from the guide scope 2m away.
Although when it comes to the selection of the guide star I've always opted for the "Auto select" in Tools.Its only been recently that Ive found out that the "Auto select" is not always the best option and manually selecting your own guide star ( being careful not to pick a saturated star ) can achieve better guiding sometimes.
I'd like to hear from members who use PHD2 with a guide scope whether they use the Star Profile Tool and achieve good results with it and secondly whether they use the "Auto Select' option in Tools to find their guide star or manually select one ( or a combination of both )
Martin, my habit was to always manually select the guide star and I never had a problem operating this way. So i never rely of Auto Select, I find it can drop what it has selected if a whisp of cloud comes across and then tries to pickup a new one. Whereas a manually selected star will hang on better.
I have never seen any issues with auto selecting stars, the only thing I have really done that was not out of the box was to loosen up the star mass detection settings a little to keep PHD2 from loosing the star, but i was getting that with manually selected stars too. That seems to be less of an issue with my 80mm than it was with my SCT.
I do have the star profile tool open by default, just to visually get an idea of how the star looks.
In my case, all the imaging software I am using handles PHD automatically so I don't even look at it apart from occasionally having a look at the guiding graph to see how it is behaving.
Thanks Glen and Paul
I might as well activate the Star Profile Tool and put it to some use , can’t hurt
In regard to the Auto selection of guide star I might try both auto select and manual select on a long night of imaging and see how my guiding runs. The PHD2 manual recommends to use auto select, maybe because beginners may tend to pick a brighter star that is saturated ??
From my experience the auto-star seems to use "conservative settings" when picking stars. In other words it tends to pick less bright stars, probably to make sure never to get saturation. If you chose manually you can usually pick a brighter, but still not saturated star.