Last night was clear so I was able to redo the polar alignment with PHD2. This time I’d read the instructions and I think I have got as good an alignment as I am going to… The graphs (which I forgot to take snapshots of) were pretty flat with virtually no movement….
So, I started playing with the guiding again, but it was a school night and I was already tired so it wasn’t successful. I had taken a test 120s shot and watched the guiding graph and was impressed that it was quite flat…. before I realised that I hadn’t actually clicked the start button in PHD and the graph was not in fact moving! That said, the trailing on the resultant image was quite small, so encouraging!
I then turned on the guiding and started the image again. This time the graph was all over the place! So, now it’s down to tuning of the settings – I need to start looking at the corrections being applied as much as the settings for aggressiveness and hysteresis as I suspect I was chasing the seeing.
I noticed that when I was drift aligning, the star was being plotted close to the center of the bulls-eye target, but when guiding it was off to the right hand side, almost always…
I will recheck the alignment, but I will also train and enable PEC on EQMOD and plough on with investigations and learning of PHD2.
For those that are interested, I came across an interesting YouTube vid, which needs watching again and making notes from!
