Guidemaster - New version for webcam autoguiding

[allan gould]

The latest version of Guidemaster for webcam autoguiding has been released. Better and more accurate than Guidedog -no need to align camera axis, calibration mode as well as dithering.
Down load at http://www.guidemaster.de/index_en.asp
I have used this program and apparently the guiding is even better with this version. I have to try this tonight as I was getting +/-2 arcsec guiding with previous program :D

[Striker]

Allan....will download it and give it a go with the toucam...thanks

[JohnG]

Thanks Allan, will give it a go next clear night.

JohnG

[[1ponders]]

Thanks Allan. Downloading now.

[Striker]

Allan...just been playing around with it before the misty clouds come over...it looks excellant.....I had it guiding for 5 minutes no problem with great accuracy.

Thanks.

[seeker372011]

thanks for the tip, downloading as i type

[avandonk]

Tried it tonight and it worked brilliantly until the clouds came in. Thanks for the info Allan. I had never heard of it. I have been using Guidedog.
Bert

[JohnH]

Allan,

Thanks for this heads up - I had been struggling with GuideDog with very patchy results - so much so I have been working on shorter, unguided shots. I spent about an hour getting this going last night and found the following:

I cannot set the LPI to anything other than 50 in the exposure settings - 50 what I am not sure. Whatever it is (ms so that means 1/20 th second I assume?) it limits me to using only the very brightest stars, so far, I hope I am missing a trick somewhere as my guidescope is only 70mm.

Calibrating and Guiding in RA was a breeze, very nice not to have to worry to much about camera orientation. A small tweak on aggressiveness to reduce oscillations and pointing after that looked to be limited by seeing rather than tracking.

BUT

I had a horrible time with DEC, calibration failed, eventually I figured out I have a big backlash issue in DEC, once I opened up the move window enough it calibrated ok - and calculated my DEC backlash at nearly 10s! I did manange to guide in DEC after that but there was overshoot, not bad considering, this is not a s'ware of course, it looks like my mount is going back to the shop (again - grrrrrr). In fact without this s'ware I would probably not have been able to diagnose this problem...so another win for Guidemaster.

I guess my main concern with the s'ware is my inability to do longer exposures with the LPI.

[allan gould]

JohnH
I would contact JohnG about LPI and Guidedog/K3CCDTools or Guidemaster. To be honest he has done far more than I in this area. Done extensive testing and he has all parameters down very well.
I use a modded webcam and all works well for me, Guidemaster measured my DEC backlash at 200 ms but other than that I just let it guide my 70x500mm scope with 2x barlow.
I think you can set the maximum time of exposure in the options setting for the camera. Will have to check this. Yes its as shown in the attached thumbnail

[allan gould]

I have contacted Matthias about this group and given him these URL threads so that he may be able to respond to questions pertaining to his software

[JohnH]

Yup, I found that setting and put it to 30s, it did not make any difference. The camera settings page lets you set auto or otherwise, again it seems to make no difference. The exposure time screen slider on the main scree cannot be moved with any of these permutations or combinations with preview either on or off?

[Striker]

John, did you change the settings under camera then options.

Which will bring up the LPI driver settings.

[mgarza]

Hello,
thanks for the usage of the software guidemaster. :) I wrote/writing this software and Allan asked me to aswere some questions.
I know, the LPI camera is not jet fully supported. Only the short exposure time is supported.
The long exposure mode of the LPI camera needs DirectX and not the old VFW(video for windows) driver.
I hope in a few weeks I will have a Guidemaster version with DirectX. A frind of mine is currently writing a DLL for guidemaster to support DirectX. We alredy tested his program with a LPI camera and it works fine. The drawback is this DLL needs DotNet2.0.:(
I'll hurry with this feature.

Best regards,
Matthias

[JohnG]

Hi Mgarza and welcome.

That is a really nice piece of software you have written, when the support comes in for the LPI I think it will be even better. At the moment it is the only letdown, I will be looking forward to the next release and testing it out. Thank you for providing it free.

All the best

JohnG