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Old 05-04-2006, 10:59 AM
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JohnH
Member # 159

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Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: NSW
Posts: 1,226
Guidemaster and Sphinx

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.
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