Tonight was my first night testing the software with my setup, and it worked very well. It's a very impressive piece of software. I do have one request though. I set the Max Error in the Autoguide section to 0.1. To my understanding the program is supposed to begin the exposure when the guiding errors or less than 0.1. What happens is for a setting of 0.1, they have to fall below 0.05 since for some unknown reason CCDAutoPilot is rounding to the nearest tenth. While viewing the actual guider corrections in MaximDL's Guide tab, the errors stayed well below the 0.1 threshold most of the time, but struggled to stay below 0.05 long enough to start an exposure. I would highly recommend to use the actual values and do not round to the nearest tenth. This wasted a lot of time. My second question is does the program use both the RA and Dec values? That is, do both values have to fall below the Max Error setting before the exposure begins? If this is the case, I would like an option to ignore the RA axis since it doesn't really matter as much as the Dec axis.

Thanks,

Wade

Hi Wade,

Before I respond, please attach a log file so that I may see your settings.

John,

Never mind about monitoring both RA and Dec. Both are needed due to a dither. It was late last night and my brain was asleep. However, the rounding problem still stands. I have attached the log file.

Thanks,

Wade

ccdap20080509_233620.log (22 KB, 79 downloads) CCDAutoPilot 3 Logfile

Wade,

I think you have a situation where precision is exceeding accuracy.

Your main imager is under-sampled of course at 6.3 asp. Your guider is binned for an image scale of 9.2 asp. So to have your guider get within 0.1 pixel, 0.92 arc-sec., is well within a fractional pixel on the imager. Even if the guide tolerance were to show two decimal places, I doubt you would see any difference on your imager between waiting for a guiding tolerance of .14 pixel vs .07 pixel.

BTW, you are using an older version. On the CCDAP menu, select Help/Update Now to automatically update to the latest version, 3.42.5.

John,

Do think it would be best to set the guider to an unbinned state rather than 2x2? I typically image anywhere from 3.5"/pixel (FSQ) to 24.7"/pixel (Pentax 67 75mm lens).

So your recommendation is to keep the Max Exposure set to its default state of 0.2. Right?

I'll download the latest version right now.

Thanks,

Wade

Hi Wade,

No, I'd still use 2x2 binning. Autoguider centroiding algorithms are typically good to better than 1/10 pixel so guiding should still be accurate.

If you mean Max. Error, not Max. Exposure, then yes,, 0.2 should be fine.