Astrophotography 2023

2023 was a surprising good year for me. I was able to take lots of astrophotos. Several nights were a total loss but overall I got to use my system a lot…in spite of forest fires. Near the end of 2023 I was not happy with my autoguiding. The guiding seemed to not settle done and there were small guiding errors that I tried to study but couldn’t identify what was causing them. When the winter of 2023 arrived I decided to take another look at my guiding and I began a very interesting journey investigating how the Open PHD2 multi-star guiding algorithm works. I spent most of the winter months investigating and documenting. I actually went to the effort of installing Virtual Studio 2022 so that I could study the code in detail. I did find some interesting issues in the PHD2 Multi-star code and I invented my own solutions to these issues.

The bottom line is that the official PHD2 Multi-star algorithm will ALWAYS show a marked improvement in your guiding. I have concluded that this improvement in guiding is questionable simply because it requires the user to make no adjustments to their mount. Something for nothing has always been a red flag for me.

I spent the first months of 2024 developing my own version of the Multi-star guiding algorithm. I managed to put together my own version of PHD2 Guiding which I have shared with a select group of people to help me debug the code. This debugging phase is now completed so I plan to document what I found, why I didn’t like what I found and what I did about it. Hopefully I will start posting about my deep dive into PHD2 Multi-star guiding, starting in 2025. Astrophotography is not my full time gig and life happens!

In the meantime…please enjoy my 2023 astrophotos