SBIG AO 8 tips

[graham.hobart]

II"ser's- I recently bought an SBIG AO8 with camera and it's hopefully on the way to me now.
I have been reading about it in the Maxim manual and also on line but I wondered whether anyone has any pearls of wisdom to help me set it up.
I will be using it with MaximDL 5 on an old (er) Vista lappie initially.
I've read it is heavy on the PC use - I wondered how heavy as I will have Maxim/Cartes du ceil/ stellarium/APT/PHD/Nebulosity open on the same machine at least some of the time-if I can get it working though I won't need PHD will I?
Just use Maxim to run SBIG w/ AO and image capturing?
:xmas:
Graz

[Terry B]

I use mt AO8 on an old xp box but use CCDSoft and TSXPro rather than maxim.
It seems to run fine with one exception. If I try to have the AO running and do a time series it will crash TSXPro after the first image. Individual images are fine. If I run it using my cheapy win7 lappy it runs with no problems.
The only thing to learn about its use is to run the calibration. You need a bright single star in the frame for it to calibrate on. Often this is difficult. The AO doesn't care which ccd you use to calibrate so what you do is swap to the imaging ccd and draw a box around a bright star with enough room for it to move with calibration. You then let the calibration occur with the subframe you have selected. Once this has occurred you can then change back to the guiding ccd for the AO to use. I often don't bother plugging the guider in and just use the AO. As long as your periodic error is low enough that the AO doesn't have to reach it's range this is ok. You can use the AO at low speed this way like a normal guider with 1 or 2 sec exposures on a quite dim star.
Cheers
Terry

[graham.hobart]

Thanks Terry- good tips.
Will hopefully have a go this weekend.

[naskies]

Best way to check is to keep an eye out on CPU utilisation, e.g. with Task Manager. If the whole system is being overloaded (overall utilisation stays at 100%), then you can tweak the balance by increasing the process priority of MaximDL and decreasing the priority of Stellarium etc.