I was just wondering if anyone was trying/using the guiding assistant in PHD2 and how your graphs looked? I’m just testing what it came up with tonight.
So apparently I had my settings too low. I was using a min motion more around .05-ish… it told me .3 and .15 respectively. Interesting…
Lots of new features in PHD2 2.4.1i!
I tried it last night for the first time. Interestingly, it told me just the opposite of you, to lower the min motion in both axis to .05. Seeing was horrible for me last night but guiding went well. Of course with the min motion so small it was issuing a correction at almost every exposure, not something I usually see or, from my understanding, desirable. I varied exposure time from 2 to 10 sec with little effect, but like I said, the guiding was still good, well below 1" total RMS despite the poor seeing. It will be interesting to see what it recommends on a night of better seeing.
Hi Marty, that sounds like a questionable recommendation from the guide assistant in phd2. Would you mind posting your guide log from the session so we can take a look?
Thanks,
Andy
I can and I’ll be out tonight which looks like better conditions so we’ll see if the recommendations are any different.
Ok, so here is a short log and a screenshot showing a short period of guiding after a calibration and the recommendation of changing the min motion to .05 for both axis. Phd Guide Log.txt (9.7 KB)
Sorry here’s the one with the recommendation.
Hi Marty, thanks for posting the data.
In this case I do think the recommendations may be a bit too aggressive, but perhaps not by too much.
One reason for this may have been that it was a bit too small of a sample (only 31 points). Next time you get a chance, could you try running longer and/or decreasing your exposure time to get more data points, like, say, 100 points? Do the highlighted High-frequency Star Motion values go up as you sample for a longer amount of time?
The min-motion recommendations really are just recommendations based on the magnitude of the high frequency motion: you definitely do not want min-motion less than the high frequency motion. But, especially on a high-end, well-aligned setup like yours, you may be able to set the min-motion values a bit higher than the recommendation.
Andy
Resurrecting the old thread here, but is there a way to run the guiding assistant on a log file? I had some bad guiding last night and didn’t think to use the guiding assistant, but still have the log files.
Thanks!
Brian
Brian, The Guiding Assistant in PHD2 analyzes star motion with guide output disabled, so it would not be able to use guide log data that was produced with guiding enabled.
You can use PHD2 Log Viewer to look at the guide log though.
If you are looking for help interpreting the log, you can post the log on the PHD2 google group.
Andy
Ah makes sense! Thanks Andy!