Successful Guiding
December 7th, 2009
It’s been a long road over the summer to get to this point, but I think I finally have this particular nut cracked. This is a single 6 minute frame of the Orion Nebula, unprocessed, washed out by the moon and as it arrived off the camera.
I’m pretty happy with that, it’s not perfect, there is a slight stretching of the stars. But this one one of 10 test images and they were all of equal or better quality. The stretch is along the RA direction which means the likely causes are periodic error and over correction by the guide software. The dec axis is working beautifully despite it’s frustrating backlash.
Experimentation has shown me that the automated aggression control of guidemaster doesn’t function very well on this mount, disabling that option helped enormously. Adjusting down the RA autoguide movement speed also reduced the stretch. The next testing step will be to do the PEC recording, however Vixen really need to improve PEC on the starbook, I don’t want to have to do it every time I want to do some imaging!