Yes…it’s TRUE. I used a 3D printer to solve a problem I have had with my Celestron CGEM mount ever since I bought it. Because I am a retired Electrical Engineer I have always been focused on finding ways to improve my guiding. The first issue I focused on was Periodic Error Correction (PEC). My very old CGEM is of the vintage when Celestron used non-integer gearing in their mounts. This resulting in a periodic error that took multiple rotations of the worm gear to repeat. Specifically the periodic error…
Year: 2025
Open PHD2 Multistar Guiding – Part 3
In this blog post I will try to explain the changes I made to the multistar code to address the issues I discussed in Part 2. A change of Focus The flagging code in the official version of multistar guiding is focused on keeping the secondary star deviations close to zero. This sounds good!…but it completely ignores what the primary star is witnessing. The primary star may be showing that a significant guiding error is occurring but the secondary stars are being flagged and ignored simple because they agree with…
Open PHD2 Multistar Guiding -Part 2
In part 2 I will go into detail explaining what I found when examining Multistar guiding. I wanted to keep this simple but it was not possible to do so. I will probably revise this a few times so that it’s easier to follow. I knew that the debug logs contain a huge amount of data that was screaming out to be displayed in graph form. It turns out that all of the secondary stars data is logged, as well as the flagging, error detection and final results for each…
Open PHD2 Multistar Guiding -Part 1
I have always been interested in improving my astrophotos. My focus has always been how to improve how I process my astrophotos and how to improve the autoguiding of my telescope mount. Because of my 30 years experience as an Electrical Engineer I focused on the software/firmware and hardware involved with autoguiding. With the introduction of PHD2 Multistar guiding I immediately jumped on this bandwagon. By the end of 2023 I was still looking for improvements so I decided to take a deep dive into the Open PHD2 Multistar Guiding…