More DIY, experiments with guiding
June 18th, 2009
I had a go with getting autoguiding working the other night with some success and some issues. The first problem was that my wireless access point down the shed wasn’t communicating back to the house very well resulting in dropped packets and the starbook being unable to get an IP via DHCP. In the end I directly connected it to the laptop via a crossover cable. That worked but it’s not quite what I was after.
Next I slewed my now dual mounted scopes round to Arcturus and spent some some getting the secondary scope lined up on it. I need to get my old spare red dot sight mounted to it to make things quicker. Once there I hooked up the webcam and ran through the configuration for PHD Guiding having a play with the webcams gain and exposure settings at the same time. It was a quick and easy process without errors and looks like it will work OK.
Next I spent some time on alignment, trying out the CCD drift align method. This was new to me and quickly showed that the mount was out, pointing to far west. I was short on time so didn’t spend to much time on this. I’ll have another go when the weather allows.
The last thing I tried before calling it a night was to test the sensitivity of the webcam for a guide camera. I slewed the mount up to the ring nebula and then tried to locate a suitably bright guide star in the second scope. There was not quite enough movement to reach Vega and the standard webcam was incapable of picking up anything else in that region. So we can say that a standard Philips SPC900NC webcam is not suitable as a guide cam for astrophotography.
Last night however I took a trip to Maplin and then took my soldering iron to the webcam. I’ll write about the result soon.
