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A Guide to PHD Guiding Copyright © 2011, Greg Marshall Introduction "PHD Guidin

A Guide to PHD Guiding Copyright © 2011, Greg Marshall Introduction "PHD Guiding" from Stark Labs has to be the most popular guiding software in use today. That's partly because of the price (free), but it also happens to be a darn good guiding tool. But even if it came with excellent documentation (it does not), there would still be a need to explain many of the functions and settings of PHD, especially for the beginner. This "guide to guiding" was created to fill that void. Portions of this text are lifted directly and without shame (but with permission) from notes created by Neil Heacock. It is based on PHD Guiding version 1.13. Some features may be different for other versions. First Steps When PHD Guiding is launched it does not automatically connect to your camera or mount. Make sure your guide camera is connected and powered on, then click on the camera icon in the lower left corner to bring up a list of supported cameras and select your guide camera from the list. Depending on the type of camera you might be prompted to select some options. To connect to your mount, first select it from the <MOUNT> menu. The choices are ASCOM, GPUSB, GPINT (at various port addresses) or "on-camera" (meaning a guide port built into the guide camera, if available). ASCOM is used to connect to a mount through a software driver that is compliant with the ASCOM standard. GPUSB and GPINT are hardware devices (accessed via a USB port or parallel port, respectively) that connect on the other side to an ST-4 compatible guide port on the mount. While parallel ports are rarely found on modern computers, the GPUSB device is a very popular way to connect a computer to a telescope mount. The "on-camera" selection relies on the driver for the guide camera to provide a guide port interface. After selecting the mount type, click on the telescope icon to connect. As with the camera, you may have to make additional selections depending on the mount and interface. The status bar at the bottom of the PHD window shows whether the camera and mount are connected (PHD refers to the mount as "scope"). It will show "no cam", "no scope" and “no cal” (no calibration) initially. This status bar provides other useful information that is often overlooked, so get familiar with it. The <TOOLS> menu also has some important features, but we'll get to those later. The other menus are not important (unless you don't read this document, in which case the <HELP> menu will be essential). Once the camera is selected you can click on the "loop" icon (3rd from left) to start displaying images from the guide camera. The first thing you want to do is select the exposure time from the pop-up menu to the right of the "stop" icon. To some degree the exposure may be defined by the brightness of available stars and the sensitivity of the camera. However, exposure duration is also important in that too short an exposure will yield images that are affected by atmospheric disturbances (seeing). Unless seeing conditions are excellent you should use exposures of at least 2 to 3 seconds. This will average out the variations in star position caused by atmospheric disturbances, thus allowing PHD to more accurately calculate the true centroid of the guide star. Once you have selected the exposure time (and camera gain, if available), click the "Take Dark" button and cap the guide scope as directed. This will capture a reference dark frame that will be subtracted from subsequent frames from the guide camera. This is important to improve the accuracy of centroid calculation. Next to the exposure setting is a slider that is supposed to adjust the appearance of the displayed images. I've never found it to be useful and it doesn't affect guiding, just how the image is displayed to you. However, you should play with it to see what position looks best in your system. In the lower right corner is the “camera dialog” button. For some cameras you can click on this button to change settings in the camera driver. Webcams typically provide such an interface. If your camera does not support it the button will be grayed out. The “Brain” Now we come to the all important and widely misunderstood "brain" icon. Although it is described as "Advanced setup", it is a near certainty that you will need to change something in this menu at some point. And even if you don't, it's very helpful to understand what the options are. Each is described below: 1) RA aggressiveness: A setting of 120 means that you are going to apply 120% of the calculated correction to the RA movement. This is probably too much. Anywhere from 70 to 100 should likely be what you want, sometimes less, but never over 100. 2) RA Hysteresis: Determines the degree to which previous corrections affect the current calculation. The idea here is that a quick change in the measured error in guide star position is probably due to a bad measurement (perhaps due to atmospheric disturbance), so the correction is "diluted" by mixing in some of the recent correction trend. In addition to sensitivity to seeing conditions, this setting is influenced by the characteristics of the mount. A good mount will not have sudden large changes in the RA position, so a large hysteresis setting is appropriate to filter out bad measurements. 3) Max RA Duration (milliseconds): Defines how large of a correction PHD is allowed to make (in milliseconds). As with other settings, the idea here is to limit the damage caused by bad measurements of the guide star position. Allowing a very large correction (in one cycle) might require a large correction in the other direction later. If there really is a large error the exposure is probably ruined anyway, but in any case it isn't going to be much worse by breaking up the correction into multiple cycles, which is what happens when the max duration limit is hit. Unlike parameters specified in pixels, the proper setting for such timing parameters depends on the guide rate set in the mount. With the typical guide rate of 0.5X (50%), the max RA duration should be set at something like 300 milliseconds, which corresponds to a movement of about 2.5 arc-seconds. Another consideration is that in most mounts (especially using an ST-4 guide port) the guiding process is delayed for the duration of the correction pulse, so allowing a large correction in one axis may delay a necessary correction in the other. Theoretically, guiding through a serial link to the mount (usually via an ASCOM driver) could make the correction more quickly, but this is generally not done. The next guide exposure cannot begin until the mount movement is done. 4) Search Region (pixels): This defines the size of the area (centered on the previous position of the guide star) to search for the star to find its new position. The default of 15 pixels (i.e., a 30 x 30 area) is generally quite adequate. Larger areas take more time to process and if it gets that far off you've got a serious problem that is probably not going to recover anyway. 5) Min Motion (pixels): This is the minimal amount that the star is allowed to move *without* sending a correction. It applies to both RA and DEC. If it were set to .25, the star would be allowed to "float around" a quarter pixel without PHD sending corrections to the mount. This is like a non-linear version of RA aggressiveness: The idea is to eliminate corrections that are probably erroneous, but in this case it is done through a threshold rather than a linear modification of the correction value. A setting of 0.15 is typically good, but it will depend to some degree on the relative magnification of the guide system and imaging system as well as on the seeing conditions and the quality of the mount. 6) Calibration step (milliseconds): This is the length of a pulse in milliseconds that PHD will send to your mount during the calibration process. Unfortunately, no single recommendation for this parameter will suffice because it depends on what part of the sky you are imaging, what the guide scope magnification is and what guide rate is set in the mount. Start with the default setting of 500ms. During calibration, look at the status bar to see how much the selected star has moved from the initial position (the goal in pixels is shown in parentheses - this number is calculated by PHD based on the characteristics of your camera). If it is moving just a few pixels per iteration you could speed things up by using a larger setting for calibration step. On the other hand, if it exceeds the goal in just a couple of iterations the calibration may not be accurate. However, a high degree uploads/Geographie/ guide-to-guiding-with-phd-guiding.pdf