Thanks for chiming in Brian! I'm sure much of my difficulty comes from using the built-in off-axis guide camera on my ST-4000XCM, so I don't have the privilege of a wider-field guide scope. Quite often this past week I haven't had a wide enough field to find a bright enough star to peek up above the sky glow. PHD2 presents a gnarly grey noisy field, and "auto select" latches onto something that's often not a star at all.

I'd love to tweak PHD2 so it doesn't latch onto non-stars. I built a bad pixel map.

On 5/28/2020 12:58 PM, Brian Valente wrote:

Hi Mojo

>>>My biggest bugaboo in these skies is finding a suitable guide star. PHD2 will lock onto any clump of noise and hunt around the sky trying to guide on it.

I'm not sure what issue you are having, but i image in the san fernando valley (the worst) and i have no problems finding guidestars, even with a simple lodestar x2. PHD has a number of techniques and filters to rule out non-stars for star selection, so i'm surprised you are having these kinds of issues

you might consider posting your logs to the PHD forums for feedback?

Brian


On 5/28/2020 12:48 PM, Mojo Jones wrote:

My biggest bugaboo in these skies is finding a suitable guide star. PHD2 will lock onto any clump of noise and hunt around the sky trying to guide on it.

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Morris Jones, Monrovia, CA
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