autoguiding without guide stars

[hnau]

A couple months ago, The Astroimaging Channel hosted Robert Majewski who presented his approach to autoguiding which makes use of the entire fov of the guide camera.  Benefits include no guide stars required, it averages atmospheric position jitter, works well when under-sampled, and increases guiding performance.  Dr. Majewski seems very willing to share his algorithm for implementation in other software as he is primarily focused on Mac development related to his exoplanet hunting interests.  Has anyone reached out to Dr. Majewski?  The addition of full frame guiding to PHD would be wonderful. 

Here's a copy of the presentation and the video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7iGYn-gjD0kRkMyT0p0bE9HdTQ/view?pageId=101253550897478781774

https://youtu.be/_rc1K72sCZs

--Zac

[Sander Pool]

Hi

I saw the presentation and agree that it would be a useful addition to PHD2. I was a little disappointed that the technique as presented only applied to short exposure imaging. I was curious if maybe there was a new sensor that allowed the readout of a small area while leaving the rest undisturbed. Or some other new technique. Really PHD2 could be used as-is out with minor modifications for his proposes. Simply dump every guide image to a new file or append to a SER. I was not convinced he demonstrated that using the whole image to determine movement between images was better than using a single

[Sander Pool]

Sorry, hit reply by accident.

I'm not sure his technique delivers better results than guiding on a single star. Certainly it is beneficial to skip star selection. I was very impressed with the sophistication of the software he wrote. Just not sure it was needed with PHD2 being open source.

Curious what others thought.

Sander

[Andy Galasso]

Bob actually reached out to us back in November and generously shared his code with us.  The next step would be to do some prototyping and integrate the code into PHD2 to see how well it works with PHD2. I still plan on giving it a try when I find the time to work on it.

Andy

[hnau]

Andy,

That's great news.  I'm happy to test or capture sample images for the early prototyping if it would help development efforts in any way.

--Zac