Testing Guiding with the CGEM

Twas a clear night, last night! I headed out to the local observing spot and was actually surprised to see that nobody else was out there. I guess everyone I knew sought after darker skies. I was ultimately joined by a good friend and his wife for a while. He was taking wide fields with his Nikon D90.

My interests last night were in setting up autoguiding for the CGEM. I would do this with my Meade DSI and William Optics 66mm refractor. My laptop battery was rather limited, so I didn't have much time to do it. I was using the PHD-Guiding freeware guiding program. (By this time I had also setup the mount with two-star alignment, three calibration starts and a precise polar alignment.

My first task was to get the image from the DSI. I had to tamper with the settings a fair bit, as previous attempts saw a massive amount of horizontal banding in the image, much like an out-of-tune TV signal. I figured that this was the result of too high a gain setting, and when I lowered that, as well as increased the exposure time on the camera, I was able to get a decent star image.

I then connected the cable from my laptop to the CGEM. The issue here was that the software had multiple mount types listed in its mount selection menu, but nothing really suggested to anything related to Celestron. I took a chance and selected the "Generic Hub" option, which I think relied on the ASCOM drivers already installed. I selected a star on the screen to guide with, and the program very quickly indicated "Guiding" at the bottom of its window. SO, I shot a snap of M42 for five minutes for a test. The resulting image was fine, but there was star movement when I zoomed in really close to examine the image more properly. I am thinking that I didn't have the right mount setting...

Sadly, at that time my laptop battery died! I really need to buy an inverter for when I am out in the field. My power supply should be ample to handle both my mount and a laptop for many hours between charges.

I spent the rest of the night messing around taking different snaps of clusters, just for fun. But my power supply ran out at about 11:30 and I had to head home as a result. I'll work on the guiding and get all of my factual ducks in a row, and then hopefully next week I'll try my first guided image from a dark sky spot...