Autoguiding

From Telescope
Revision as of 17:47, 7 February 2011 by Seckert1 (Talk | contribs) (AUTOGUIDING)

(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

AUTOGUIDING

Once you have focused the camera on the target, take a single image with MaxIm DL. On the “Camera Control” menu, click on the “Guide” tab. Click “Expose,” starting out with an exposure of around 10 seconds. If there is no bright star with which to guide on, depending on the field of view, you can move the telescope slightly. Click on the “Observatory Control” icon next to “Camera Control” and then click on the “Telescope” tab. There should be arrows pointing in the four directions. Move a few arcseconds–keeping track of which direction you move in so that you can navigate back–until you find a star of suitable brightness. Click on the star. Then, on the “Camera Control” window under the “Guide Tab,” click “Track” and then hit “Start”. If the object is too dim for MaxIm DL to track with, an error message will show up. Try increasing the exposure time or moving the telescope so that the guide star is more in the center of the guide camera’s field of view. If this is unsuccessful, search the field for another guide star, but only do this as a last resort.

If you lost the guide star due to clouds, stop, wait for clouds to disperse, and then restart guiding.

If the star is suitable, tracking will begin. Click on the “Graph” button just below “Track.” Use this graph to monitor the error in guiding.

f the angle is correct, you can fiddle with the agressiveness, as shown below. The agressiveness is a measurement of how "hard" the telescope is trying to keep the error at zero. If your agressiveness is too high, then that could result in jumps.

On the other hand, if your graph is drifting, AKA going in an angled line away from zero, until +/-5, then your agressiveness might be too low. The nice thing about changing the agressiveness, is that you do not need to stop guiding in order to do it.