Quote:
Originally Posted by Shiraz
according to Cyanogen, "In most cases, you can set Binning to 2 or 3. Binning 1 is only required when you are using a separate guide scope that is a much shorter focal length than the main scope. The guide camera can have 1/10th the resolution of the main camera and still guide very well, since the software can measure the centroid of a star to a tiny fraction of a pixel".
http://www.cyanogen.com/help/maximdl/Autoguiding.htm
FWIW, my guide system works fine with pixels that are about 1/5th the angular resolution of those in the imager. |
Yes SBIG claimed their lens guide kit will guide great. Similar argument. I did not find that to be the case at 1260mm focal length in a good seeing environment on a good mount well polar aligned. It was very hit and miss and mostly miss. So I would modify that datum to it would depend on the PE of the mount.. More accuracy is better than lesser accuracy overall but high PE mounts would have PE that is easy to detect whaereas high end mounts would have very low PE that would require a bit more accuracy to detect.. I notice the AP guide scope is F9 and quite long that they sell for their refractors. But I get that the guide scope may not need to be the same focal length of the main imaging scope. Although the best guiding I get is from a MMOAG which gives the same focal length but smaller image scale with an SBIG STi 7.4 micron pixels.
1x1 binning not always be practical as brightness of guide stars can be an issue. A workaround is to put a reducer on the front of your guide cam to help with star brightness. Guiding with a reducer and a sensitive guide camera with an IR 750nm cutoff in a strong no flex OAG may be the ultimate guide cam setup. If you have enough guide star brightness then 1x1 binning may add an additional level of accuracy. In some cases it may be easier if you only have a really bright over saturated guide star it could bring it down to more manageable levels.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DJT
Hi Greg
I recently went to binning * 2 for guiding and its made quite a difference in terms of having bright enough stars to guide on with the MMOAG. Star shapes are fine
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by niharika
If you have a suitable guide star with good SNR bin 1 is fine, that's what I do most of the time. But at times there are no suitable guide star for reasonable guide exposure and in those cases I do Bin 2x.
|