[netwolf]

Hi All,

I have posted a enquiry on the stark labs group and have some feedback from Craig Starks on the issue. But I wanted some information from the local users here.

On Saturday night Kal (Andrew) and I setup at Apoman's (Peter) place to test out guiding on his setup, as we had some issues at the SPSP. We are noting that DEC Calibration keeps failing for us. Our AE errors at one time were reported as A13 and E15 and on a second cold start (post battery fail) the were A~30 E~56 (not sure why the discrepency possibly because we did not use a reticle eyepiece to align stars).
Though these A E errors may seem high we are pretty sure our barlowed drift was almost nill. PHD is set to default values and we were using 1 and 2 sec exposures for the guide camera. Even though DEC cal fails the RA guiding continues and DEC guiding is disabled.

Craig advises this is normal for objects near the pole as we were trying to image Centauras A, Omega Centauri and ETA Carina.

Further to this the second and perhaps the main problem is that PHD seems to lose the guide star and flashes red. The coincidence here is that it seems to occur while were making a 60 sec exposure toward the end of the exposure. PHD will beep and flash red to indicate star is out of the green alignment box. When we did 30sec exposures guiding seem to be ok, but we were still getting star trails. On review of our exposures Peter advised that a unguidied 30sec exposure showed no stair trails.

We will be gathering again around the next new moon to continue our fine tuning of the process. Also Kal and I will test the Guider on our own setups (but we do not have Gemini only the Digital Drive). Next time i think i will take some more accurate notes of what transpired.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Regards
Fahim