Haven't seen a Helix for a while!

[alocky (Andrew lockwood)]

Here's 1.5 hours of O3 and Ha each through the 10" starfinder.
I'm slowly working through the gremlins, but guiding at better than about 2" is eluding me. More experimentation tonight!
Cheers, and thanks for looking! astrobin link is
http://www.astrobin.com/63401/
Andrew.

[TimberLand (Justin)]

Guiding is a bit of an art form science. Btw different cameras, mounts, and software, the combinations are large so standard instructions don't always apply. My biggest gremlin I had with my new mount was the size of the guide step. I had the mount moving far too fast and too many arc seconds.

Good luck chasing your issues cross fingers you have some success.

Helix has been photographed like a member of the royal family but just one more photo is hard to look past.

[leinad (Dan)]

Keep going Andrew, need alot more Ha.

Guiding in that pic seems to be Ok; bear in mind the atmospheric seeing hasn't been all that great the past few weeks; you'd be possibly fighting alot of refraction with the guiding.

I've seen the conditions shifting recently on weekend nights through my meteor camera pointing at zenith(filtering through the nights captures).

[gregbradley]

That image is very good. Guiding seems to be quite good. Its worth experimenting iwth different settings, exposure lengths for the guide camera, delay or no delay, aggressiveness settings.

Of course it all starts with a more precise Polar Alignment and good balance rather than software settings.

PEC can make a big difference and take the stars to the next level in terms of roundness. I found ProTrack in the Sky X also helped make stars tighter.

Greg.

[alocky (Andrew lockwood)]

Originally Posted by TimberLand

Guiding is a bit of an art form science. Btw different cameras, mounts, and software, the combinations are large so standard instructions don't always apply. My biggest gremlin I had with my new mount was the size of the guide step. I had the mount moving far too fast and too many arc seconds.

Good luck chasing your issues cross fingers you have some success.

Helix has been photographed like a member of the royal family but just one more photo is hard to look past.

Thanks - I'm about to experiment with metaguide, which looks like it might solve some of the software conflicts and seems to be better for long FL.

Originally Posted by leinad

Keep going Andrew, need alot more Ha.

Guiding in that pic seems to be Ok; bear in mind the atmospheric seeing hasn't been all that great the past few weeks; you'd be possibly fighting alot of refraction with the guiding.

I've seen the conditions shifting recently on weekend nights through my meteor camera pointing at zenith(filtering through the nights captures).

Cheers Dan - I think you're onto something there, the seeing on the weekend was spectacularly ordinary! Focus was really soft and I thought I'd lost collimation.

Originally Posted by gregbradley

That image is very good. Guiding seems to be quite good. Its worth experimenting iwth different settings, exposure lengths for the guide camera, delay or no delay, aggressiveness settings.

Of course it all starts with a more precise Polar Alignment and good balance rather than software settings.

PEC can make a big difference and take the stars to the next level in terms of roundness. I found ProTrack in the Sky X also helped make stars tighter.

Greg.

Thanks Greg - unfortunately training the PEC on the G11 seems to stop it accepting any input on the Dec axis, so I just let the autoguider do all the work. I've got permission to build an observatory onto the house we're building next, so polar alignment should become less of an issue! This weekend being a full moon should be a good excuse to fiddle with settings on the camera and software.

I think the guiding is a lot better than I thought as the image scale with the DMK41 chip at 1125mm is about 1"/pixel, so maybe my expectations are a bit high.

Anyway lots to try!
cheers,
Andrew.