Hi there. I have had Voyager for quite a while but I haven’t had to guide. I just bought a new OTA that will force me to start guiding again. Having never bothered with the guiding setup in Voyager, I have some beginner level questions.
Can someone please walk me through the process of setting everything up software wise? Do I do a calibration within PHD2 first or does Voyager handle it? I saw a feature of the Array system that mentioned something about guide calibration and wondered if the higher level of Voyager does it all on its own?
Anyways, what options do I want to use? I’m using an OAG that is part of my camera. The new PHD2 has multi-star guiding I guess and that will be fun to play with. What options do I need to check-box both in Voyager and PHD2? I have a rotator so in theory I don’t have to reverse for DEC right? As I could just have the rotator flip 180 so the orientation of the sky remains the same on the other side of meridian.
I just want to avoid a night or two of “tinkering” to get this right. Any and all help would be appreciated very much. I don’t currently use drag script.
Hi , you have all on base license to guidindig without problem.
You can calibrate out of Voyager or inside, just flag in sequence the flag calibrate under the guide tabs.
For guiding you must flag the guide checkbox always in guide tab of sequence configuration.
For dithering you must flag the dithering flag always in guide tab of sequence configuration.
Voyager will do all for you.
If you calibrate outside Voyager will not change the vector for your at meridian change so you must do this on your guiding external application like PHD2.
Otherwise if you chose to calibrate in Voyager , Voyager will calibrate for target also at meridian change.
With rotator you can choose to not calibrate and ask to manage it in sequence and maintain the same orientation.
Easy way to not loose time is to calibrate in Voyager.
I am glad you posted this, I am keen to try multi star guiding with my setup and had not realised there was a snapshot build with it enabled. I am using an ioptron CEM70G with it’s inbuilt guider and it usually has a lot of stars in the field, the guider field of view is almost as big as my imaging field.
I calibrate my guider in PHD2 directly and have it load that calibration each time, unless I think it is not performing as it should.
You must download the develop version.
For use with voyager please not use RoboGuide but native star selection method in OnTheFly or in the Sequence configuration, and remember to select the multistar guide checkbox in PHD2 settings:
I wish I had sen that snapshot yesterday! Last night was the last clear night I expect to see for at least a week but I did not set up as I shoot OSC and with the moon phase, it is not worth imaging. I could have tested all night without wasting any good imaging time.
Thank you for the pointer Leo. Looking forward to a future release where RoboGuide implements the multi-star selection of PHD2. I know Voyager can do field star guiding but I have never managed to get that going properly. My guiding is good enough as it is so this is just nitpicking.
RoboGuide will never be able to use the PHD2 multi star because PHD2 chooses in that case all by itself. As I wrote just don’t use Roboguide.
To use Roboguide there is nothing to do or set except to select it in the sequence configuration. The guide will always be made by PHD2.
RoboGuide is “just” and AI automata to auto select single star for guiding in one image, when PHD2 was really bad to select star or if you using system that cannot auto select star for guiding.
