Fist Light - Qguide (aka QHY 5)

[JohnH]

I just recieved my new QHY5 guidecamera, tanks Gamma.

First impression - what a small, light neat package, just right to pop on the WO66 and is barely bigger than the 2" draw tube and light too...

Second impression, well this is no surprise, but the configuration of the camera is tricky. It can be configured to be one of several models depending on the software you intend to use it with (in my case PHD and Guidemaster) so you need to learn a bit more about USB than you probably care to but after some futzing around I had it working with PHD...so let's get it under the stars...

And very happy...with a 2 sec exposure I have potential guidestars all over the fov (which is 48'x60') looks like I can go to Mag 10 - maybe lower and high resolution gives me good sensitivity (2.8" per pixel), sub pixel guiding means I will be limited by seeing but I should easiliy get down to 1".

I still have some USB issues to resolve - but I did 2x10min guided runs on a mag 9.5 star with subpixel accuracy - something I have not been ble to do before so it is a good start...that is Acrux in the middle of the image...

[[1ponders]]

Tiny little blighter ain't it. Good luck with it John, and of course we expect a full article on it once you have finished the shake down. ;)

[Dennis]

Thanks for the details John - all looking good so far. Look forward to more chapters in the book as you use the QHY5 guide camera.

Cheers

Dennis

[Garyh]

Lookin good John, I thought about the camera but decided I will just go for a toucam. No WDM driver sort of put me off so it would have limited software support....Please tell me if I am wrong...

[Terry B]

Great
I can't wait until mine turns up.:thumbsup:

[JohnH]

It's just different mate, the toucam is king for planetary imaging, but it would need a long exposure mod and adpater for use with my little guidescope...and Iam pretty sure it would not match the QHY unit for sensitivity. You can do planetary with this BUT it is not designed to do it you have to use HDCapture or Qvideo and I have not attepted it yet. There are a few pictures out there from those who have and it looks promising...main issue seems to be too much data for the HDD to cope with....

[Astroman]

Impressive. How much for one of these out of interest?

[JohnH]

Andrew, I paid a miserly sum (AU$254) for mine but I think I was lucky as I got a spot in a shared shipment, I think the price will vary with the AU/USD rate too. Check with:

gamaelectronics@aanet.com.au

[Astroman]

Thanks John, nice price

[JohnH]

Finally a clear night and I am able to use the qguider again.

I now have the Qguider configured correctly to work with PHD and find it to be a very light, sensitive and accurate guidecam. In fact it is far superior in this use to the Orion Starshoot I used before. Whereas I was limited to +/- 1 pixel with the color camera I am getting +/- 0.2 with the Qguider, this means I do not have to use a barlow (less weight/flexure and bigger fov). It really is a pleasure to see the guide field sprinkled with usable stars at 1s without having to use TEC.

Last night I did a series of 5 min shots of M8 as a test - I did no polar alignment - just placed the tripod in the normal spot set DEC corrections to go in one direction only (S) and let PHD 1.5 take the strain.

The result is attached...this is my best autoguided result to date but I still have a couple of questions so can I ask for some comments on the guiding please? To assist I have attached plots of the RA and DEC erorrs and associated corrections applied.

Guidecam exposure was set to 3 seconds to minimise seeing effects but I see fairly frequent and large spikes in RA, these all seem to be about the same magnitude and so I assumed these spikes are seeing related, however on reflection, if they were, I would have expected to see a similar frequency and size of spike in in DEC but that is not the case? The scale is 2.8" per pixel on the dx/dy plot and ms on the corrections plot. I have RA corrections applied at 0.7x.

If these spikes are not seeing related what is the most likely cause? Currently PHD "sees" these errors as real and attempts correction, the hysterisis setting and slow RA guide speed seem to have prevented this from causing wild oscillation but I would like to understand what is going on. Can seeing excursions really persist for > 3 secs at this sort of rate?

I plan to re-do this test using Guidemaster 2 for comparison.

[jase]

John, I actually think it looks rather normal considering the equipment capabilities. Have you programmed PEC yet - Vixen made the firmware available sometime ago?
The Ra and Dec stats you provided, is that over at least two or three worm periods? It is not easy to determine a precise trend as seeing interferes with the corrections. This is the reason why when you program PEC, you need to do so over at least five worm periods to level out the seeing. I usually go for eight or nine worm periods before creating a good PEC curve.

[JohnH]

Jase, thanks for that....yes I have got build 35 with PEC installed - I was probably the only idiot in the world who used build 34 - I was so keen to get it but it is of no use...

Here is what I can tell you about the SXW and the original starbook (I hear there are multiple hardware variants of it out there so what is true for me may not be true for the ones supplied today or of the Starbook S models).

PEC training is definitely not retained after a power off.

In addition it is a very poor implimentation of PEC as it stands today and can
easily make results worse. The main reason for this is there is no mechanism to refine or average out multiple training runs (or none I can find) thus the corrections are applied out of synch with the errors by the duration of the guide exposure. If you shorten this interval you get better correction but end up introducing seeing effects unless the atmosphere is very stable during training.

The worm cycle is 8 mins on the SXW so the charts show a little more that two revolutions (1000 seconds) but the rest of the data looks the same over a period of about 5000s.

If this is normal for the equipment does that mean the 1" jumps are irregularity/roughmess in the gears? So I should look for a pattern of such jumps? Is cleaning and/or adjustment required?

I attach a plot of the RA errors alone for 8 cycles...

[jase]

Hi John,
Looking at the eight cycle worm period you have provide – I would almost consider this text book perfect – certainly from an auto guiding aspect. I would say that +/- 1” is your baseline. Keeping in mind that guiding corrections do always correlate direct to the worm error as previously mentioned. There is obviously other factors such as the accuracy of polar alignment, seeing conditions blah blah (you not the stuff).

I heard that PEC on the Sphinx was a bit of a dud. Let hope they get it right next time. Ultimately, integrated PEC should allow you to record two or three runs and average them. I believe Gemini provides such functionality as do other telescope control systems. I only ever have one PEC run programmed, but it’s usually a very good one.

I would keep your guiding exposure times high so you don’t chase the seeing – between three and five seconds is good. Longer is better if you’ve got a stable mount that tracks well, but this also depends on your focal length you’re using.

Not sure how keen you are, but you can you can try swapping you dec worm with the ra to see if you get any improvement. The improvement would be very marginal, nothing drastic I suspect. As you mention, you could also look into further adjustments or regreasing to squeeze out more performance - http://enzerink.net/peter/astronomy/pages/sphinx.htm#radecworm

[JohnH]

Thanks Jase....really appreciate the feedback.

I think I will stop where I am for the moment - perhaps a longer guide exposure will help as the PE is quite low and smooth on the Sphinx - worth trying anyway.

[netwolf]

John, it would be great if you could do some longer exposures with the Qguider and post them. If it can show 9.5mag star in 2sec, I wonder what kind of capability it has for DSO imaging. There are drivers for it for MaximDL and other similar apps. Also it would be good to see some Planetery work with these to. Some promising photos have been posted on Qhy forums.
Looks like a winner for guiding, i am just wondering how much more it can do.

Regards
Fahim

[JohnH]

Fahim,

Mate I would be delighted to do so, can you fix the Wx for me? Say 3-5 cloudless nights, prefereably at the w/e with no dew and great seeing?

Seriously though I am intending to have a shot at Jupiter as soon as the weather permits me to..(also bear in mind my cam is the mono version, the colour one will be less sensitive (1/3 approx)) of course that will mean shorter not longer exposures. I really had not thought to use this for DSO work...

[netwolf]

Depressing it is to see all this rain run down the storm water drain. If only it would fall where it is needed and leave us with clear skies. I am thinking of getting the Cmos camera, but am awaiting further DSO and Planetary results. I am geting this while I save up some more for the Qhy2Pro, I was going to get the Qhy2 but I would prefer to wait for the mono.

Regards

[Vince G]

G'day John,
I'm glad you got the q-guider working.
Mine was too, but now it wont.
I'm reformatting my computer and I've forgotten how to set up the camera for guiding. I was using PHD.
When I was having problems connecting to the camera, I couldn't get the computer to find the drivers.
Would you give me some steps to do please?
Vince G

[Harpspitfire]

john, im in the USA- i got tired of waiting for the Qguide and ordered the opticstar 130M from the UK, (same clone)- i sent mine back to the UK yesterday, i COULD NOT get an image on my screen, when i did it was totally washed out at focus!!- as contradicting as this sounds- at night i couldnt even get a guide star- it was like that they didnt exist!! mine came with etAMcap and opticstar viewer, i tried others too like QC focus- etc, whatever i tried the camera still had the same 'malfunction'- i couldnt see any exposure speed settings other then auto- can you tell what i may be doing wrong??- they're going to check the camera and either fix it, replace it, or tell me im an idiot using it!!- LOL, john

[JohnH]

Hi Harp,

I had not heard of the OpticStar 130M it looks like a re-packaged version of the Qguide, the QGuide is actually CCDLabs (USA) version of the QHY5 camera, it is also sold by Astrolumina, M42, Gamma Electronics and probably others. The chip in the camera is the MT9M001 1/2inch cmos which has two vesions, color and mono. This chip is used in other cameras as well such as the Fishcamp starfish, the Mightex CMOS and I assume the Opticstar unit BUT these are different animals.

I can only speak for the QHY5 - it really is great value and exactly what I wanted. Setup requires a little patience, my issues were caused by a faulty laptop...the rest is just configuration.

The only oddness is that you must set the camera up to work with the software you want to use. Thus you must run the utility VIDPROGRAM to set the camera up correctly before you switch from MAXIM (say) to PHD. This is not difficult. Full details can be found at

http://www.astrosoft.be/qhy5.asp

and

http://qhyccd.com/ccdbbs/index.php


PS. The image on the Opticstar website is one I took! I sent it to Marcus (Guidemaster author) some time ago....but it was not guided with a qguider it was guided with an LPI!

[Harpspitfire]

thx for the links- mine's the MT9M001 cmos also- when i previously did reseach on the micron chip- the only thing different i seen was variations of the programming, my camera 'worked' with virtually any capture software i tried- but like i say- i couldnt get ANY KIND of a viewable image-- i kinda hope something IS wrong with the camera, so whenever i get it back- ill see if these others give me better camera controls- john- BTW- heres the link to what i got for curiousity sake
http://www.opticstar.com/Run/Astronomy/Astro-Imagers-Opticstar.asp?s=191ed363-ef5f-480c-a378-368821c3180&p=0_10_0_50_80

[Terry B]

My CMOS camera has turned up today.:P
Boy it's tiny. Now just let the clouds roll in to stop me trying it out.!

[JohnH]

Funky little fellas ain't they....hope it does what you want it too, mine has been very good since I resolved my USB issues - though the clouds and rain have meant it has not been used in anger as much as I would like....keep us posted...

[Terry B]

Well I've been able to get my win2000 notebook to recognise it and give some pics. It's cloudy and blustery outside so the pic is through an old 500mm mirror lens of some books on the other side of my office. The image certainly demonstrates that it works. Hooray!!!
It seems very sensitive and a 10 sec dark exposure doesn't have too much noise. I will have to wait a while before the conditions are a tad better before I could venture outside. Maybe on the weekend.

[JohnH]

Re-configured the camera for use with Guidemaster which I prefer as I get better control over the guide parameters and a visual confirmation of the tracking and drift. The first results are attached. The on - screen image seems less bright that with PHD making it a little harder to select guide stars - but the control, sub frame and drift alignment tools make it worth the swap imho. Guiding was to +-2" which is as good as I think I am entitled to expect out of this equipment...

[whmacs]

Hi Guys,
I received my QHY5 (from Gamma) yesterday. I plan to use it to autoguide my Nexstar 11 GPS (it has an ST4 compatible autoguider port) while I image with an 80ED mounted on top with an Canon EOS 400D.

I checked the firmware and it as VID:1618 PID:0901 which is the QHY CMOS.

The first thing I done was install the windows XP drivers in the QHY5 Qguider Drivers/Drivers directory on the CD Gamma provided. This worked fine and the red light on the camera came on.

I then copied the CCDSoft 5 drivers into the correct directory in CCDSoft (I own CCDSoft 5 as I have an ST-237a). I can then see the camera in the drop down list, but when I try to connect to it I get an error. Does CCDSoft 5 need different firmware? There is no documentation on this.

I then down loaded the demo of MaxIm /DL and copied the two files off the cd into the MaxIm directory as documented. Once again I can see the camera (Q-Guider) in the MaxIm drop down window, but when I try to connect to it I get the error saying "An error has occurred while attempting to communicate with the camera" The notes say you need the ALcc5 or CCD Labs firmware.

I exclusively purchased the camera to autoguide via my ST4 port, is there any other autoguding software I should try?

As mentioned above I run VIDPROGRAM and I see that it is programed with VID:1618 PID:0901 This is the QHY CMOS. So, do I need to reprogram the firmware to use CCDSoft or MaxIm /DL and if I do reprogram the firmware do I need to use different windows XP drivers other than the QHY5 Qguider Drivers that I initially installed?
Once last question, where can I buy a 1.25" nose piece for the camera? I need this to mount it to my SCT.

Any help that could be offered would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Stephen

[DeanoNZL]

Hi Stephen,
You will need to change the firmware to use with the other software.
VIDPROGRAM a Programs the astrolumina ALccd5 (16C0:081A)
VIDPROGRAM g Programs the CCDLABS qGuider VID/PID (1781:0C7C).
After running the vidprogram util, power down the camera.
Then install the drivers for either CCDLABS or Astrolumina, depending on which firmware was chosen.
Then power up the camera, and Windows will find the driver needed.
*Note* If the driver and firmware do not match, vidprogram will not run.

Let me know how it goes, hope this helps:thumbsup:

[whmacs]

Hi DeanoNZL,
Thanks for the advice! Do I need to uninstall the QHY5 CMOS windows drivers I initially installed? Also, where in device manager (I'm using XP SP2) do I look to find the camera? I had a bit of a look, but couldn't find it.

Regards & thanks,
Stephen

{quote=DeanoNZL;233369]Hi Stephen,
You will need to change the firmware to use with the other software.
VIDPROGRAM a Programs the astrolumina ALccd5 (16C0:081A)
VIDPROGRAM g Programs the CCDLABS qGuider VID/PID (1781:0C7C).
After running the vidprogram util, power down the camera.
Then install the drivers for either CCDLABS or Astrolumina, depending on which firmware was chosen.
Then power up the camera, and Windows will find the driver needed.
*Note* If the driver and firmware do not match, vidprogram will not run.

Let me know how it goes, hope this helps:thumbsup:[/quote]

[DeanoNZL]

Hi Stephen,
Don't uninstall the drivers, it will need them again if you want to change the firmware.
I have all the drivers installed so I can "play"
In device mgr, it will be under USB controllers when the driver is loaded.

Regards

[JohnH]

a) No need to uninstall old drivers
b) Goto Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager and look at your USB controller - if the camera is connected and talking it will show up there...

[whmacs]

Thanks Guys,
I'll check it out tonight when I get home.
Does anyone know if CCDSoft 5 will work with the ALCCD5 firmware?

cheers,
Stephen

[allan gould]

Sorry guys, but this sort of messing with drivers, compatability etc is what put me off this guider and indeed anything that uses a laptop. I want simple cos I'm stupid

[JohnH]

True Allan, it is a bit messy to setup but then it only costs ~$200.

[allan gould]

True - can't beat the price for the camera but then you have to add the cost of a laptop to run it. Still know what I prefer.

[DeanoNZL]

Hi Guys,
I can see your side Allan, but I have to have a laptop to capture from CCD.
Plus, by changing the firmware code, it changes from a Guiding cam to a 1280*1024 rolling shutter cam for video use.
So far, results have been favourable.
Hopefully to be used for the total eclipse next month, if the clouds & rain ever clear.:lol:

Regards

[whmacs]

Hi Guys,
Thanks for all the advice today. I'm at home now and have reprogrammed the firmware to ALCCD5 and have installed the ALCCD5 windows drivers. I now have the camera happily working in both CCDSoft 5 and MaxIm/DL 4.5.

One last question, does anyone know where I can by a 1.25" nose piece for this camera?

Regards,
Stephen

[Terry B]

Try http://moggadapters.com/astro/adapter.asp
an item called a TM-1.25.F

[JohnH]

I had another run with the camera and Guidemaster - my polar alignment was poor - carry/plonk method - however the software coped well and I was happy to see there was no detectable field rotation in 3 and 5 min exposures. The attached is M20 again at 50% of full scale. I am please with the tightness and roundness of the stars - I had the guide exposure up at 5s so the mount was behaving itself too. I estimate the errors were mostly +-1"

[Dennis]

A very nice result John - you've got to be happy with that. M20 looks stunning, with gorgeous colours.

Cheers

Dennis

[whmacs]

That's a great photo John, what was the camera and exposure details?

Regards,
Stephen

[JohnH]

Stephen,

Sorry I normally post those details - Canon 20D at iso 1600 and 3 min subs, 32 in this case, taken at prime with the VC200L. The image was processed in IP and then NoiseNinja and finally Photoshop to get under 150Kb for the web...

[Terry B]

I played with my q guider last night. It didn't miss a beat in -3 deg conditions. With a 2 sec exposure I seem to be able to aim it anywhere using my skywatcher 120mm refractor as a guide scope and have useable guide stars.
I attached a saved file from PHD of 2 sec exposure. I am not sure what the mag of the stars are as I didn't bother looking through the scope but I imagine they are 10-12 mag.

[Terry B]

Dear All
I have attached a graph of the corrections on my scope using the qguide.
The mount is an eq6 aiming near antares. THe first half of the graph is guided then I turned the guiding off and the periodic error is shown plus some drift north from less than perfect polar alignment.:eyepop:. The little kick to the south is from me touching the scope.

[tornado33]

I have yet to use any of the autoguide sofware I have drivers for PHD though I note from here that Guidemaster might be better. I dont actualy have an autoguidable mount as yet but would like to experiment with guide software and have the star on the screen and basically me to the adjusting, eg when it drifts one way in dec to use the speed control to compensate. Does both PHD and qguide allow you to see the guide star in real time?
I note that Q guide does dark subtraction too
Scott
PS thankfully my install of the camera went smoothly and it worked from the word go :)

[Zuts]

Isnt autoguiding just great :)