Pulse Guiding, The Right Rhythm

I am not sure what the right way of launching guiding is (PHD). Should it be launched from inside SGP environment or independently from it?

Thanks for any input.

I would also like to know the answer.

In my case, SGP is never able to start PHD. So I start it manually, perform calibration and then start capture in SGP. SGP is then able to talk to PHD to start guiding. Sometimes, PHD ends up picking a bad star. In that case, I just start guiding in PHD by manually picking the right star and tell SGP to just capture. Luckily SGP is able to send dither commands to PHD.

After doing some reading, it looks like the only thing that SGP wants to do
is to send dither signals to a Guider that is already running by itself
although in my case I can launch PHD2 from SGP. I have concluded that
unless you want to dither, which I don’t yet because I am a beginner, SGP
and PHD do not need to be aware of each other.

Hi Pawan,

Next time this happens could you please save the guider image (PHD2 menu: File, Save Image) and post it to the PHD2 Forum. Please also include your PHD2 debug log with your post.

For PHD2 to work with automated imaging apps like SGP, it needs to be able to reliably select the best guide star in the frame, and we believe it is pretty good at doing that based on our collection of sample guider frames that we use to test with. Ideally, you should never have to manually select the guide star. If there are cases that PHD2 is not handling, we would like to investigate, but we need to see the camera frame and debug log.

Thanks,
Andy

When you go to your equipment manager screen and set up auto guiding you choose PHD as your auto guiding method. When you click on settings next to it you will browse to the PHD program in your computer. Once you do this then SGP will know where to look to launch PHD and it will automatically open for you. When you click on connect all in the tools menu not only will it connect all your camera, filter wheel, focus and mount but it will also start PHD and connect your mount and camera.

The concern that I have with doing this is that I cannot know if the PHD2
that is launched by SGP is aware of the EQMOD running and is able to deal
with its parameters or not. Also sometimes SGP stops functioning in the
field and I have had to restart it or the entire computer in order to
continue with the session. At the learning stages that I am in I am
thinking that I should separate these programs from each other until I am
sure of what I am doing and what they are doing.

Thanks for the input.

SGPro does not care who starts PHD2, just as long as it’s running and has its server enabled, all will be fine. SGPro needs to coordinate with PHD2 in order to start guiding, stop guiding, pause guiding, perform dithering, ensuring that the mount has settled prior to integrating and optionally to automatically restart a frame if something goes wrong with guiding.