PHD2 Graph help

[mswhin63]

Hi All, I am not having any major issues, I was concern about the image result on PHD2 graph during drift alignment.

In the image the RA alignment blue line has numerous spikes in the waveform. Any idea what this may be and any fix. I believe it maybe my mount which seems to have a bit of backlash issues, but really not sure.

[AndrewJ]

Gday Malcolm

The "vertical bar plot" in RA is indicating the "calculated" guiding data, and the bars give a relative indication of direction and duration for the pulses.

Andrew

[mswhin63]

Thanks for that. I fortunately noticed after I stopped guiding a clean graph was shown, but still concerned there maybe an underlying issue for such large spikes.

[AndrewJ]

Gday Malcolm

Not sure what you mean by "large" here????
The "drive" data is plotted to show pulseguides being sent, but as far as i can tell, the plotted height is arbitrary. You would need to replot the underlying RA/DEC data using a known scale to see whats really going on ( if anything ).
Did you happen to save the session data as a log???
If so there are several apps that can open the log and display it in a better format for review purposes.
PHDLab is one freeware viewer for PHD2 logs.

Andrew

[mswhin63]

Thanks Andrew, That is great information. I will look into it, now with a pier setup I want to get the best from my mount.

Cheers

[AndrewJ]

Gday Malcolm
If you are mainly interested in analysing the mount at present, then you could also use the free trial version of PEMPro, or if you have a webcam/videocam, you can use Metaguide. Both those have the ability to grab and analyse whats going on, and their logs can be easily analysed by FFT methods. Metaguide runs happily at a very high frame rate, so is useful for analysing high freq errors in the raw mount. It also allows third party apps to grab data for display purposes whilst it is grabbing data in the background.
Lots of ways to skin the cat.

Andrew