It's been mostly cloudy since the beginning of October limiting my skygazing and auto-guider familiarization. Last night I finally was able to put it all together.
The test was as tough as it gets. My second floor patio is pretty useless for skygazing with all the trees blocking my view except for a narrow ~ 15 degree opening to the south. The patio overhang blocks the sky above. Despite, my lack of access to Polaris, my rough alignment with north, I managed a single star alignment on Nunki with the Celestron AVX using the AVX Quick alignment.
The forecast was for mostly cloudy so it was imperative I use whatever clear sky quickly. I slewed over to and centered M22 on the ASI294MC Pro sensor. A bright star was selected, the PhD2 button was clicked and calibration begun. With the F/6.3 focal reducer and diagonal EFL was calculated to be 880 mm. For this first try it became evident the guider was not tracking with considerable drifting by M22.
After a few stumbles with advanced settings I started getting a 'star moved too little' error. I reviewed the advanced settings in the help files which are pretty good. I had inadvertently unchecked the Enable Guide Output ... oops. Enable Guide Output box checked calibration went smoothly.
M22 had moved behind the trees by the time I corrected my errors. I slewed to and centered M75. Auto-guider calibration went quickly on the selected star and auto-guiding started. Focusing was not the best on either the imager screen or the auto-guider screen. Nonetheless tracking was spot on for a series of 8, 15 and 30 sec sets of 25 subframes. Great performance considering the mediocre conditions.
Fingers crossed, the forecast for Saturday is for mostly clear night skies. My hope is a good workout for this great little device at one of my darkish sites.
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