What is the best autoguiding software

[jase (Jason)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

It would assume a guide camera capable of taking 1 second or less and a mount where guide exposures of 3 seconds or more won't let the PE build up too much between corrections.

What guide exposure lengths are various members using for what mount?

Guide exposure intervals come down to how good your mount tracks at a sidereal rate, how low is your PE and what focal length you're operating at.

Permanent installation with the FSQ and Losmandy Titan with PEC trained, I could track close to 900s with stars still pin point sharp - no guiding. This was around 3 revolutions of the worm if I'm not mistaken. The only limitation was that of not dead accurate polar alignment. During regular use, I still guide however, but at 10s exposure interval. Alas, lets face it it...530mm far from difficult! 2000mm+ is where it starts to get a little hairy raising.

The act of guiding should be reduced as much as possible. Don't try to correct lame polar alignment or no PEC correction, etc through guiding. Try to address these issues before you even start guiding! The less guiding corrections that are needed the better.

[Bassnut (Fred)]

Excellent Jase, thanks.

[avandonk]

I take most of my images at 300mm FL. I have a 90mm Mak with a FL of 1250mm as a guide scope. Even though my mount does not suffer from random 'jumps' due to gearboxen I have found that even at 300mm FL guiding is very important.
I can take a two minute image and the mount will not move by more than one pixel. This is enough to soften a stack of images though.

I use GuideMaster as it controls both the shutter of my 5DH and so it can move between exposures to dither the data collected.

There is no 'best' software as only you can work out what works for your setup.

It is up to you to control the variables to make it work best for you.

Take some time no matter what you use to adjust the settings. A tiny tweak can make the difference.

Bert

[pjphilli (Peter)]

Originally Posted by g__day

I think the gap is closing between PHD and MaximDL (having used them both). The current version 1.12.1 of PHD now allows you to adjust about 3/4 of the parameters I'd want to change on the fly, and see exactly how the tracking responds.

I think some more fuzzy logic is needed by PHDs brain, to compensate for seeing errors and backlash.

PHD has an enormous amount of user discussion and feedback into Craig Stark, easily triple the amount of discussion on the Maxim board - so as Craig gets time there is alot of push for where and how to improve PHD.

What I'd love to see is an experts side by side comparision of the two with analysis of results obtained to get rid of the subjectivity in this excellent question!

Matt

Hi Matthew - I have just downloaded PHD 1.12.1. Which parameters can you download on the fly and how do you do this? I have not yet had the opportunity of trying it on the night sky. Cheers Peter

[Octane (Humayun)]

Peter,

Once you start guiding, go to Tools > Enable Graph.

In the graph screen, you have access to guiding aggressiveness, minimum pixel move, dec slope/weight and something else, can't remember.

I was playing around with aggressiveness the other night; I started on 80 and ended up sitting on 83 for the remainder of the night as it seemed to be a sweet spot. It's a great new feature!

H

[wysiwyg (Mark)]

Greg,

I was a long time user of PHD when using a DSLR and worked perfectly.
When I shifted to a CCD camera I have used MaximDL ever since and have not looked back.
Like mentioned before its not the best tool to be used by beginners.

CCDSoft and the PME have a guiding interface called Direct Guide, for which you dont even need the Guider cable from your camera to your mount, all the guide correction signals are transmitted via USB. One less Cable to deal with.
Personally I have never used it as I use Maxim so I cannot comment on its performance.
Maxim have since also built a similar interface, I think they call MicroGuide or something like that. With this I have had mixed results.
I still use a dedicated guider cable though.

Cheers
Mark

[gregbradley]

I am just setting up my PME now. Should have it up and running tomorrow.

NJP is nice once polar alignment is spot on but ready to take it to another level.

It sounds like Maxim DL is the go and those plug ins look to be pretty useful.

Also a permanent installation which I now have again is the way to go. You can tweak the polar alignment over several nights getting longer and longer exposure time checks for drift.

PHD sounds good though.

I also have an SX Lodestar guider now to try out. Its extremely light and compact and gets its power off the usb cable like the Starfish did. The Starfish was heavier though (I had the cooled version).

Greg.