Murray,

On your first question, I think the telescope mount manufacturers are doing what they do best. I've owned several AP mounts and can't think of a lot of ways they could improve. Maybe going to a USB interface instead of the older Serial ports would be my top suggestion. However, I think there are plenty of opportunities for advancing the state of the art in auto-guide camera software.

Averaging several short guide star exposures is one of them.

Another technique that I heard of people trying was using multiple guide stars to calculate position. The idea is that seeing related changes would be seen differently by the various guide stars in the field. I haven't seen much data on the results achieved by doing this, however. My feeling is that small format sensors like that used in guide cameras would have all stars in the image seeing the same effect.

I did some work myself on something I call predictive guiding. The idea is that you would collect historical guide star error data over a period and then look for trends. For star drift due to polar miss- alignment, for instance, you would typically see a fixed error in a particular direction. Rather than waiting for one entire guide period and then issue a single large correction, the software would portion the same total correction via many smaller corrections. The idea is to make smaller corrections but more frequent. The results I found were significant.

What we need is to see more of the software developers out there devoting more time to the guide problem. It seems to me that most of their efforts are devoted to the image processing problem.

For your second question... you can certainly use the SSAG as a primary imaging camera but there will be problems. First is the fact that the SSAG is limited to only 8 bit data. This will not be enough for many deep sky objects that need a camera with better dynamic range to capture the fainter regions of the object. Secondly, the CMOS image sensor in the SSAG suffers from line noise artifacts that will limit its performance as an imaging camera. The Starfish design uses the entire 10 bit pixel data captured by the sensor and has dedicated image processing hardware to remove the dynamic line noise. So, you can use it as a primary imaging camera for some of the brighter objects but you really have to coax the image out of your raw data during post processing to get good results. You'll make your life as an astro-imager a lot easier by using a true 16bit camera for your imaging.

Regards,

Bob PIatek