Finally! some success with autoguiding!

[Daniel]

Took the setup out last night (I will refrain from calling it a scope any more becuse it's grown into a monster) and for the first time managed to get it to autoguide, didn't actually image anything to note apart from one 4 min sub of M51 because by the time i got everything up and running the clouds started rolling in, but that one image was pin sharp, so I was very happy and could even make out more detail in the one image than I've been able tosee before in my stacked images!

Im still having a few teething troubles, firstly my LX modded camera drops frames every so often which messes with the guiding, also I found that after a while PHD stopped refreshing, has anyone had this problem.

Anyway, despite teething troubles, Im a happy bunny!

Daniel
:O)

[Fay]

I don;t think I have had that, Daniel, although have read about it freezing on various web sites. Perhaps you can advise us of the settings you have in PHD. How are you sending instructions to the mount?
John will give you some answers on this one.

[RobertM]

Hi Daniel,

I've had PHD hang on me to, I can't be certain but it may have had something to do with the lappie going into semi-powersave mode.  Nothing else was affected and image capture continued uninterupted, other than no guiding that is.  It also seems to go unresponsive when I try to cancel 4s exposures but only occasionally.

[Ian]

I sometimes see this with mine on either WDM or VFW, can't remember which right now. Have you tried both?

[Daniel]

I think I may have cracked it, I've been running a virtual machine of windows XP inside windows Vista (the drivers don't work well under vista) but i think it was getting mixed up trying to share the hardware between the 2 operating systems, I installed the camera drivers in vista aswell as XP and now It seems to be stable!

Anyway, I guess i shall know for sure when i take it out in the field next time

:O)