Autoguiding the LXD55
A little patience is rewarded.
Learning how to autoguide the LXD55 was a fun winter project. Here is a look at the setup and process that I used.
70mm Televue Ranger (marvelous guidescope) with MX7C and a 80mm Stellarvue Nighthawk coupled with SXV 9C for the main imager. Temperature is -15C on a beautiful clear night. Ice is forming on the focuser drawtube. It is cold but not horrifying.
Running two instances of Maxim DL/CCD. The GUI looks like this:
There is a fair amount of activity happening at the same time so lets break it down into manageable pieces. After connection and getting both programs running and the cameras focused - a guide image is taken with the MX7C.
The original exposure is only 3 seconds and that is why I am so happy with the MX7C and Televue Ranger combination. There are quite a few guidestars to choose from and the program selects the brightest one automatically. The selected guidestar is tracked in the top right hand corner.
The interfaces for the camera and telescope. The camera is now set to track after taking the initial exposure and telescope correction commands are sent to the autostar handcontroller. Slewing to objects can be done through the interface on the right or manually entered through the Autostar. I like to verify the position on the interface by checking object/identify on the Autostar just to make sure both are in sync. Also - set the guide speed setting on the hand paddle to guide. There is no place in the program to do it.
The tracking graph. I was quite happy to stay within +/- 5 arc seconds during the guide. I haven't done anything special to the mount like hypertune or PEC train for that matter. This is an out of the box refurb. Here the Y axis is running south a bit. This updates on the fly.
The Main Imaging Camera
Now that the guiding is going along nicely, the main imager is set to a sequence of 10 images at 60 seconds with each saved to file automatically. Theoretically I can walk away at this point setting a higher number of images but I like to hang around in case something goes wrong. This session went well. Here is the result:
Some stars are saturated but the core held up fairly well.
Please feel free to leave comments, ideas or questions at the bottom of the page.
Best
David
Related article: http://tinyurl.com/bpbge
David Hersey
4 Comments
Reader Comments (4)
Envisage does a pretty good job of autoguiding... and since I already need a laptop to image there is no reason not to use it for guiding as well.