Star Emulator

[ejcruz]

With so much clouds around these days/months, I came accross this FREE software which is suppose to emulate a guide star on your computer screen with sidereal movements/tracking allowing you to test your autoguiding, periodic error, etc indoors. It appears all you need to do is setup a laptop with this software around 5 meters away, focus onto it and start testing your autoguiding or recording your mount's periodic error, have downloaded but not tried as yet. Just thought it may be of interest to the group.
http://sweiller.free.fr/SGE/SGE-star-guiding-emulator.htm#download

Cheers
Eddie

[Merlin66]

Works very well!
Allows you to set up your scope/ mount/ guider and "practise" at finding and tracking a star under PHD etc.
I've used it with an ED80/ OAG/ QHY5 on an HEQ5pro mount.......

Ken