Guide dog

[rumples riot]

Hi all,

well after my short session of shooting Jupiter last night I decided to finally get around to setting up Guide dog and testing its ability to guide my scope. I set up all the connections ran through the setup routine, but could not open up the telescope selection. Stuart (Beren) had told me he had the same problem. So; not to be deterred I pressed on and setup on Antares. It guided for 25 minutes without moving out of the little box. This was with a 2.5 Powermate and the Toucam looking through the LX200. So I knew that the program was working as I know my alignment is not that good.

Anyway after this I thought I would give the D70 a couple of shots through the ED80 just to test my theory. Because up until present I have only shot a maximum of 3 minutes for all my deep sky work. So I dropped the ISO down on the camera to 640 and determined that two shots at 6.5 minutes ought to show up any star trailing. The result was that the guide dog program was working despite the fact that it did not know which scope it was guiding. The stars were round and crisp and showed no apparent signs of trailing. Nor was there much movement in the image from one to the other.

So I guess from now on I will be taking longer shots with a lower ISO and going deeper into the shot.

Here is the resultant image.

Coments welcome:cool:

[slice of heaven]

Spot on.
Thats another ace up your sleeve.

[rumples riot]

That would be good if I was playing Poker, well maybe not might get shot.

Still yes another good thing to learn.

Hey have you looked out the window Slice. The weather in Adelaide has gone to overcast. Hope it rains, if it is going to be like that.

[slice of heaven]

Still sunshine but theres cloud towards the hills. Yeah, Let it rain if theres going to be cloud.

[rumples riot]

Just an update on Guide dog. The reason why when choosing the telescope tab that the program crashes is that you have to down load the ASCOM drivers for the 20 odd scopes that guide dog supports. The link for the Ascom drivers can be found in the pre-requisites area on the web page.

or right here http://ascom-standards.org/downloads.html

Hope this all makes sense for any of you that are interested in using guidedog for your guiding needs.

[acropolite]

Paul, a question on guidedog, do you know if PEC still relevant when guidedog is controlling the motors.

[rumples riot]

The better your scope and alignment the least amount of adjustments that guide dog has to make, so yes PEC training will be beneficial. I have not done PEC training since updating my Autostar from2.01 to 3.01 last year. Too lazy to do it. However, I know that I must do this soon as this is obviously affecting my deep sky images.

So the short answer is yes.

[gbeal]

Paul,
glad to see that it works for you.
I was using Iris, but found it crashed a lot, so went to K3 CCD Tools, and paid for it. Maybe I should have tried Guidedog instead.
Either way it makes life easier huh?
Gary

[Astroman]

Is there a way for guide dog to guide the scope while the scope does PEC training? Just a thought to make PEC trainig easier.

[acropolite]

Take a look at this link it explains it all. http://www.users.bigpond.com/lansma/art_pec_training.htm :D