Losmandy G811 and Best Practices

[c172...@gmail.com]

I have had some success with PHD2 and want to improve on it.

I do not normally get below 1" RMS error.  I do not have a pec curve programmed.

I have a 9.25 SCT on a Losmandy G811 mount.  I need some time to play with it and tweak it.  Polar aligning and time has been a problem.

Should the Losmandy G811 be balanced slightly east heavy ?  I sometimes image and get a  meridian flip, which will obviously mess things up.  Is it recommended to be east heavy?

With regard to multistar guiding, which I just learned of today.  Will this benefit me?

 I use an off axis guider.  I am probably using a 1384 focal length setup through the off axis guider on a zwo 174MM mini guide camera?

Should this image present varing seeing conditions?

How bug free is the code for this feature?

Thanks

Jeff

[Brian Valente]

Hi Jeff

Some of your questions really should be answered in the Losmandy forums (https://groups.io/g/Losmandy_users/) but i'm happy to answer them here

Comments are inline below

On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 5:53 PM c172...@gmail.com <c172...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have had some success with PHD2 and want to improve on it.

I do not normally get below 1" RMS error.  I do not have a pec curve programmed.

I have a 9.25 SCT on a Losmandy G811 mount.  I need some time to play with it and tweak it.  Polar aligning and time has been a problem.

Should the Losmandy G811 be balanced slightly east heavy ?  I sometimes image and get a  meridian flip, which will obviously mess things up.  Is it recommended to be east heavy?

This depends on the vintage of your G811. If you have spring-loaded worms you do not need to bias the weight. If you do not, then yes generally it's better to bias your weight east. When you meridian flip, you should re-orient your weight to still be biased east (some people use a small counterweight attached to the counterweight bar when balancing, and after the meridian flip, they simply remove the small weight)

With regard to multistar guiding, which I just learned of today.  Will this benefit me?

It might, and it certainly won't make things worse. 

 

 I use an off axis guider.  I am probably using a 1384 focal length setup through the off axis guider on a zwo 174MM mini guide camera?

Should this image present varing seeing conditions?

not sure what you mean here ?

How bug free is the code for this feature?

It's pretty solid - i would guess hundreds if not thousands of people are using it, and the few bugs that cropped up were minor and fixed in dev3. 

 

Thanks

Jeff

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Brian Valente

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[c172...@gmail.com]

Thanks Brian.  I will look more/check into the Losmandy forums for PHD2/Losmandy questions.

I do have the spring loaded worm so I guess I won't need to bias the weight.  That's good.  

What I meant above about the "image presenting varying seeing conditions" is this...

I thought I had heard that with a long focal length setup, probably like mine, or maybe they meant longer, not sure?  I don't remember where I saw the post.

"If patch of sky that the off axis guider looks at is rather small and one were to use the multistar guiding, it might not do much good."

I have this analogy/relating to what I was thinking....

If there is a boat drifting in the water, all the people rise and fall the same standing on that same boat.. So if I multistar guided on the boat from shore, and the people were considered different stars, the guider would see the same translations/movement.  Yet, if I had a very wide field of view, (Not an off axis guider at 1384 FL), the multistar guiding analogy would be looking at different boats or possibly a lighthouse and the stars seen would make the algorithm much more robust.  

I'll give it a try and see what happens.  But I was wondering if trying to guide at 1384 focal length doesn't really enable the multistar feature (because the small swath of sky is basically moving the same way over the whole sensor).

Anyways, thanks, I will give it a try sometime.

Jeff