There are several practices/actions that should be considered/addressed when you begin your PHD2 journey. Always reference this "Best Practices" article when you are first starting out with using PHD2
https://openphdguiding.org/PHD2_BestPractices.pdf
The following gives several important steps/tweaks/advice that will certainly help. Now if you are already a user and have not got things completely under control (and who amongst us can claim that), these tips by Bruce Waddington one of the developers will certainly help.
- 1. Increase the guide speed in the mount to 0.9x sidereal. This can help to mitigate the
Dec backlash problem in the mount and will let you use shorter exposure times.
- 2. Try binning the guide camera at 2x2. To do this, create a new profile with 2x2 binning and the new guide speed you set in step 1.
- 3. Disable star-mass detection for now – that’s on the Guiding tab of the Advanced Dialog
- 4. When it’s time to do a calibration, *always* move the mount north as the last step before starting the calibration. You can do that with a slew or by using the hand-controller. Just be sure you can see the stars moving on the display.
- 5. Try to use guide cam exposures of 1-2 seconds with this setup. Longer exposures give the mount too much time to wander off track, which can affect both guiding and calibration.
- 6. Re-run the Guiding Assistant with the new set-up and accept its recommendations. Re-run the backlash test and look at the graph to see how the mount behaved.- you can do this even if something went wrong with the test. For that matter, you can use the ‘Review Previous’ button in the GA to see what happened in earlier tests.
- 7. Don’t monkey around with the guide parameter settings, that’s just making things worse. You need to develop a clear view of what your mount is capable of doing before trying to figure out how best to work around its problems. The Guiding Assistant runs will do that for you – you should expect a lot of uncorrected periodic error in
RA and a lot ofDec backlash. If theDec backlash is too large for PHD2 to handle withDec backlash compensation, you can guide in only oneDec direction. There are instructions in the Help guide for that and it can work very well for you – lots of people do it.
Hope this info helps make your autoguiding just a little (or maybe even a lot) better.
Cheers,
JT