Live Test with AutoGuiding - But guiding wouldn't run.

[Eric Dose]

But under #1 if I start at 3 sec won't the star be blown out and over exposed? So I cut the top off?

Probably not, but even if it does, it will then decrease the exposure time for the actual guiding, or it will choose a fainter star. Even if the guide star is a little bit saturated at minimum exposure time (rare), it usually will guide just fine.

Most have more trouble getting a good guide star at all than saturating guide star. And you can very probably decrease the minimum guide exposure time from 1 second--I run my SBIG guider at 0.5 sec exposure all the time.

The main thing is to prevent frequent need to use maximum guide exposure time to find a star. Unfortunately, that's just what will happen if initial guide time is set to the minimum. It will frequently fail to find a star on the first try, then it will go immediately to the maximum guide exposure to try again.

[Richard Asarisi]

Thanks Eric I understand the reasoning here, I'll give it a shot.

[Bob Denny]

Thanks Eric!

Richard, ACP automatically adjusts the exposure to meet a signal to noise ratio for the guide star, whether chosen by ACP's crude-ish way or AcquireStar's smart way. I don't expect everyone to read all of the docs. So this is just a map to the info on how this works:

Snap1.png

[Richard Asarisi]

So Eric Since you have the same mount, my guiding seems to be okay but I think it can be better, I am mostly always below +1 to -1 but the guiding is pretty choppy. I have the aggressiveness set to 5 for both x and y and this image shows my advances settings. Let me know if they are in the ballpark. Thanks