Auto-Guider Tutorial - SkyGuider Pro and Star Adventurer

hey guys today we're gonna be covering Auto guiding with a sky guide er pro or a start adventure this is something that I was trying to research but honestly I couldn't really find much information online so I went out I bought an auto guider bought a guide scope tested it all out so now I can report to you guys today how well this actually works I'm gonna show you how to set everything up also shoot what I bought and hopefully by the end of the video Auto guiding will make a lot more sense and ultimately this should allow you to take much better and longer exposures with a telephoto lens or even a small telescope alright and here's my actual auto guider so the auto guider itself is just this piece on the back and that slides into what's called the guide scope so the auto guider has two ports here we've got a USB port and an ST four port we'll cover those more later but this portal go on your laptop this and your star tracker and as you can see it's a very small compact little camera and it's plugged into almost an equally small guide scope and then this is what allows you to look up at the stars just kind of like a lens or small telescope and then on the bottom I have a hot shoe adapter so this will actually slide right on to my camera and that's how I mount everything but this is really all you need to get again you've got in Auto guider which is like a very small camera a little tiny guide scope and then a way to mount it and you don't have to go this route but that's the route I went down so now that we've taken a look at this we'll continue on and see how you said actually up on your camera now before I continue there are different ways you can match your auto guider to your sky got a pro or if you have to start a venture that actually makes things a lot easier but since I do have the sky gutter Pro there's really not an easy way to mount it anywhere on the declination bracket so what I've done is I bought this hot shoe adapter and all I have to do now is attach it directly to my camera's hot shoe and then tighten it down and now once it's nice and tight it's pretty much gonna follow my lens wherever I point and that's exactly what we need at night and this works pretty well it's not completely tight as you can see it moves around even though it's kind of not as tight as you can get and that's just because this adapter is one size fits all and not every hot shoe is quite the same and basically it's not perfect but at the same time for what we're doing it works more than well enough because even if you can just turn it like that you can kind of just jam it there you can even get like a toothpick some way but I've never really had any issues with it even though it does move around a little bit but I wanted you to be aware of that if you decide to go this route that's by far the easiest cheapest and simplest way to do this again if you have the started venture I'll include a link in the description there's a guy out there he's done a really crazy set up with his so you have a lot more flexibility if you do have to start a venture but first guy got our pro uses this adapter is the way to go as far as I'm concerned it's relatively cheap and it works well so that's all you have to do to mount the auto guider to your camera and then from here you would attach the two cables one would go into the track or the other to your laptop we'll look at that next but before we get there I thought we'd talk about which auto guider I bought which guys scope I bought and how well they actually work when I was researching Auto guider there was quite a few options the first one that I found was the Orion magnificent mini and this one costs about $350 for me that seemed kind of steep I mean that's almost as much as I pay for this guy got it pro and without any reliable information online I wasn't really sure if it was worth paying that much for something that might even not work that well so with that in mind I kept doing more research eventually I found zwl and they make pretty good cameras for a reasonable price that's what I have here this is the ZW o ASI 120 mm mini and that one cost me around $150 now unfortunately right after I bought it I was using it on my laptop and I noticed there's some odd compatibility problems did some more research and it seems like since this is a USB 2.0 model it's a little bit older I guess it does tend to have compatibility issues now after the first few times I use it it seems to actually work fine I don't know why it was a hassle to start but with all that in mind this is probably the cheapest out of guide you can get that works reasonably well but I don't necessarily recommend it because like I said there are compatibility issues with it especially with newer laptops it seems and it's suddenly there's like a 50% chance if you buy it it might not work for your computer so with that in mind if you want to get a reasonably priced guide scope or rather auto guider I'd recommend the ASI 120 mm s it's basically the next step up from this it's the supercharged version if you will and that one has USB 3.0 that's the main difference so in this model everything I've read sounds you just plug it in your laptop and it works provide you get all the drivers and I haven't really seen any issues with that one so now that I've bought and what I bought if I could go back in time I would buy that asi 120 s and it seems like that's one of the best options you can do it works it's not too expensive and overall it's a great little auto guider now of course that's the only half of the gear that you're going to need of course you're gonna need a guide scope as well and what I have mounted here this is the zwl 30 millimeter f/4 guide scope and this one cost me about $100 the reason I bought this one a it's zwl I figured I'd match it with the auto guider but also it's very small as you can see right here it's very lightweight it only weighs about a pound and when we're attaching stuff to the top of our camera we want something lightweight obviously so with all that in mind that's the guide scope I went with again that's the zwl 30 millimeter f/4 and to be clear it actually has a 120 millimeter focal length which if your photographer used to that more the 30 millimeter is not the focal length to be clear so that's the auto guider and the guide scope that I bought they both work well together and it's a very simple lightweight addition to your camera setup with that in mind though it is going to throw off your counter weight balance when you're doing your balancing at night so what I found is that this isn't my normal camera so this is actually going to balance pretty well but point being if you have your counterweight way down here at the bottom with your current setup if you add the auto guider you might need to get a second counterweight now just because it the fact that it sits so high up and that's one extra pound right around there it will throw things off so just keep that in mind you know you could maybe put some magnets on the bottom here although I don't want magnets around all my camera gear and stuff but you have a lot of options you'll just have to buy another counterweight I know William optics recently released an extension rod for this guy got it pro so that's one option you can do as well that looks pretty nice but anyway just be aware that this will rocker kind of weight balance a little bit moving forward now that we've covered the auto guider and the guide scope you also need to have a laptop with you from now on that's how this whole process works you're gonna have your laptop right here on site usually next to the tripod that way you can control everything and do the actual guiding but if you're having a laptop running all night you're probably gonna need a portable battery as well and that's we're going to talk about next now since I spent about six months on the road each year I ended up going for a pretty nice battery this is the jakhary 240 watt hour battery so you can see I've got a way to plug in my laptop now I've also got some USB ports and a DC port there so this has everything I need I can even charge it while I'm driving or if I go to the library this was a perfect option for me but it cost about $250 so if you're just getting an external battery for auto guiding alone you don't really have to go out and buy this model for all that money I know celestron I think they've got like a power tank something like that so that's what I would recommend maybe something cheaper I won't break the bank but if you are traveler like myself and you want a good quality battery this seems to do the job pretty well I've used it a few nights now I haven't had any issues and that's really all there is to it when it comes to extra gear so next what I'm gonna do is set everything up and then I'll show you how well this actually works so here's how my setup normally looks at night it's pretty basic you know you could probably do a lot better but since I'm tight on space I can't afford to really crammed anything else in just to recap we have our USB cable connected from the auto guider to the laptop we've got our st4 cable here from the auto guider to the star tracker it's going to be the same if you've got the sky guide err pro or the star adventurer then I've got my portable battery down there and everything's resting on my hard cases that I normally used to carry my camera gear and all that so this helps keep it off the ground but it's obviously not comfortable to crouch down there all night so maybe you'll get something if you get like portable chair or something that might help but this is how my setup looks and then really all you have to do is run some software on a laptop that's gonna ultimately send commands to your star tracker and it's going to help you have much more precise results when you're shooting with a telephoto lens but this is really all there is to it pretty simple setup all things considered next let's talk about software because that's really what ties everything together so you're gonna need two applications to do your Guiding I mean you really only need one but we're gonna cover two today the first is PhD 2 this is ultimately your main application and this is what's going to control your star tracker ultimately and to be honest this is a very simple application you only have to press like 4 or 5 buttons Andray on the box it should work really well so you don't even have to necessarily mess around with it you just press those buttons and you're good to go that's one of the great things about Auto guiding is that it's really not hard to do it all especially after you've practiced even just one night the other application you're going to want to check out is called sharp cap and sharp cap is another free application you can get although we're gonna be using it for a very specific reason and that's for a precise pull or alignment so instead of having to crouch down here and break our knees and her back trying to look through the polar scope we can just use our auto guider and guide scope now to do our polar alignment and not only will this allow us to be much more precise like I said it's a lot easier on your knees and back if you have to like really crouch down to look through there so that's another great addition to having an auto guider with you but unfortunately for sharp cap it's not available for Mac users as far as I know so you're kind of out of luck there maybe you can just give you in a small little Windows notebook or tablet that might be a worthy investment just specifically specifically for auto gotta you might actually come in handy but with all that in mind we're looking sharp cap first just because this is the app I do first at night and then we'll look at PhD 2 before we continue on in a sharp cap there's usually three things you want to do each night so just like normal we would set up our star tracker pointed up towards the North Star but before you add all this extra stuff the declination bracket aligns and all that do your rough polar alignment so crouch down look through the polar scope verify that the North Star is where it needs to be in the reticle by using your app make your adjustments here on your altitude in your azimuth once you've done that that's gonna help us a lot later on then once you've done your precise polar alignment attach your declination bracket your weights your camera now we need to rebalance everything especially if this is your first time with the guide scope it's gonna throw off the weight so we're gonna loosen it lock it down in this case pretty good balancing not a problem and while we're at this there's other one other point I need to mention with this particular adapter on my particular hot shoe it does flex left and right a little bit so we are going to be moving everything in this horizontal position for sharp caps so with that in mind really like torque this to the right be that way doesn't fall over there later you'll understand what I'm talking about later on but point being just make sure this is angled off to the right then you could position everything back and the last thing we need to do before we go into sharp cap is angle our ultimately our guide scope to the North Star as close as possible so I just crouched down behind here and even if this thing is off-center from the lens a little bit I can use my declination axis here to turn it towards the North Star so do what you got to do to get it point up as close to the North Star as possible lock everything down and now we're finally ready to go into sharp cap that's just gonna make everything easier now that we've done these basic adjustments once sharp cap has loaded up we need to select our camera so you should have already installed your software and drivers and plugged your camera in your laptop once you've done that hook up two cameras and then we'll select the camera that we have plugged in in this case I'm using the Z wo now at this stage we have access to all of the camera settings over on the right the only two really concerned about though are the exposure listed in seconds four milliseconds I recommend putting it to two seconds right out of the gate that I get you where you need to be and then the game down below put that to like 70 or 80 to start off with at that point the stars should be visible provide you focused your guide scope already one other thing you want to do if you're gonna be doing the polar alignment feature let's go up to file settings polar alignment and you need to put in your exact latitude and logic dear if you're doing this on a Wi-Fi connection you can just hit geo locate and it should automatically pulling that information but you need to make sure you remember to do that otherwise you won't get the most accurate results now with all that done we can go up to tools and then when I click on polar align and this is what's gonna allow us to get a really accurate polar alignment so this is just gonna tell you all the different steps you needed to take but really interests it next and I'll bring up our main window sharp cap is now doing a process called plate solving in other words it's looking at the Stars that I can see on screen it's using an internal database and it's figuring out which direction it's pointing based off the distances of the stars so it's pretty advanced stuff you can read everything there on the bottom of the screen it's really pretty essential stuff but the main thing we're looking for is that solved in green and towards the lower right he's got to make sure that sharp cap can detect enough stars to continue on but provide your point pretty close to the North Star you should be fine what I'm doing on screen right now is I'm actually adjusting my azimuth in my halted suit screws on the base of my sky guider Pro and my goal is to get the North celestial Pole and Polaris visible on screen I only really recommend doing this your first couple nights see and get the hang of what's going on once you get paired with this you don't really have to do this but once we get the North celestial Pole visible on the side of the screen it'll help to make you aware what's going on so again I'm just adjusting the altitude and the azimuth screws on my base right now and we're seeing the adjustments in real time the reason it's so laggy is because my shutter speed on the auto guider is two seconds so every two seconds it refreshes with a new image now this is important here that au mi the big bright star that's Polaris and you can see it's pretty close to the North Pole there the point where all the stars rotate around so this is giving us a much more accurate polar alignment then we can ever get potentially using just the polar scope built-in to our star tracker again you don't have to go through all this work to get the North celestial pole centered on the screen with Polaris visible in fact the other night I was way off to the right and it still worked really well and I was pretty close on my alignment but I only recommend doing lists like the first few nights to get comfortable once you've gotten at least some of those green concentric rings and it says solved you can click Next down there in the lower right and now it's going to tell you to rotate 90 degrees on your right ascension so for that we're gonna head back on the field and then we'll make that adjustment alright so sharp cap has asked us to rotate everything 90 degrees all we have to do is loosen our clutch here drop it right down there so everything's horizontal now and lock it down tight you also want to make sure at this stage again that this lens and guide scope hasn't tilted a little bit to the right and also make sure your declination axis is locked down because if it's not you might see the star is constantly streaking because your lens is actually very slightly rotating so just make sure everything's locked down nice and tight make sure it's in the horizontal position that's 90 degrees so I'm vertical now we can head back to the laptop and go through the rest of the stages in order to complete the polar alignment process and get to this stage you will need to purchase the sharp cap Pro license which is about 15 dollars a year just be aware of that but provide you got the license and everything's working you should now see that polar aligned error is around 48 minutes ten seconds and it's rated as poor so our goal now is to adjust our altitude and azimuth screws on our base and get that number as low as possible and thankfully we have a bit of a health force there it says right and up so we need to rotate our azimuth adjustment screws to the right very slightly and we also need to rotate our altitude knob up just a little bit and this is kind of tricky to do the first night it probably took me 30 minutes to get the hang of it and then last night it took me less than two minutes and I got it almost perfect so point being don't get discouraged your first couple times doing this the main things you're looking at are the right and up it might also say left and down depending on how your alignment is but all you're going to do is just make very slight adjustments on your altitude knob or your azimuth adjustment screws one at a time and see even get that polar error as low as possible if you can get it to the point where it says fair like it does right now that's usually good enough for what we're doing but you want to be even more she can keep making those adjustments until it's down to good and that's actually what I got it too last night in just under two minutes so it definitely takes some practice but really all you're doing is moving your screws very slightly one way or the other until that number is as low as possible that's really all there is to it you could alternatively look up at the screen where it has a yellow line go to the crosshair but that doesn't make nearly as much sense it's just being the numbers down below once you've gotten everything looking good and sharp cap we can rotate our system back to the vertical position and now we have a very precise polar alignment that's gonna help us get better results when we're shooting at night so that's step one finished now we need to position our camera and lens to the object we want to photograph for the night whether that's the Orion Nebula dramedy galaxy whatever it is we're going to just loosen our right ascension and our declination and then point everything wherever it needs to go and also you're gonna want to zoom in you're gonna want to take your test photos at this point get everything sharp and focused at whatever the focal length you want just like we would do on a normal night then we'll lock down our right ascension lock down our declination and just make sure everything's secure at this point once we're pointing up to the object we've got the object centered and focused and everything looks good now we can head back to the laptop start up PhD two and begin our guiding just make sure your cords aren't getting too tangled up because that can cause you issues later on in the night the first thing we want to do when we get into PhD two is click the little USB icon the lower left and then connect our camera and also our star tracker if you're not sure how to settle this up there's plenty of YouTube videos online already I also cover this in my Auto guider course which is now part of most of my courses over on my website so you can check that out or just find it on youtube it's pretty simple to do that's step one that was we connect everything step two is we need to begin taking exposures to see the stars here on screen so we'll go back down the lower left and click the begin looping button looks like a green refresh icon once you've done that the stars should become visible on screen then we can adjust the gamma slider here at the bottom to make the overall image brighter or darker you might need to do that and we'll also adjust the shutter speed to three seconds that's a good starting point once you've done that there's one other thing you have to check so for this we'll go down to the brain and we're gonna go the algorithms tab because we need to turn off the declination algorithm our Start adventure and sky guider Pro do not have an automated declination like most telescope mounts so we have to turn that off and you can do that right from here just turn that off that's really all you have to do everything else is good so we'll just hit OK the next step is to select a star so you can either auto select a star and PhD we'll pick out one that it thinks is good just like that or you can click on the star manually you might want to do that you got to be careful though because if you click on one manually you might see a red sat in the lower right which just means the star is too bright so you can try clicking on another star and verify that there's no red Sat anymore in this case we're looking good it's really up to you whatever you want to do you can either auto select a star click on one manually either way once a star is selected we'll click the begin guiding button down there in the lower left looks like the PhD 2 icon at this point PhD 2 is sending commands to your star tracker it's telling it to move in different directions and it's seeing which way the star moves on screen and by doing that it's able to figure out which direction is pointing and ultimately give you good results so this stage will take 2 or 3 minutes to complete once it finishes those yellow lines should turn green and now pH t2 is officially guiding and that's really all there is to it it's now doing its job and we can head back to the camera but what you want to do is just check the graph there with a blue and red line all we care about in this case is the blue line that's our right ascension that's the only thing that PhD 2 can control on the sky guard approached our adventure and provide you stay between plus or minus 4 seconds that should be plenty good even if it goes to plus or minus 6 that's probably gonna be fine this gets a lot more tactical we don't have time to go into this today but those are arc seconds and usually I you know the blue line should just be flat right around that zero line that would give you the best possible results the more up and down you see the worse your tracking is again this is something I cover in the full auto guider course but in this case what it's doing right now is good enough to get like 5 minutes it's 600 millimeters so if you see that that's a good sign if you see huge jumps though that means you've got problems and you'll have to do some adjustments but usually right out the gate it's gonna work this good you really don't have to worry about it and then you can head right back to your camera and start taking your photos you have to remember if you ever change this lens position throughout the night while you're guiding you're gonna have to essentially restart PhD 2 and redo your calibration because since our star trackers are kind of dumb compared to the telescope mounts they don't realize that you're pointing in another position in the sky and it'll throw everything off so point being if you've photographed Andromeda let's say and you're done now you're going to photograph Orion and you reposition everything make sure you the best bets probably just to close out a PhD to completely restart it and just go from the beginning because every time you move this lens around you have to essentially restart PhD 2 with our star trackers now that we've talked about how to set up an auto guider I thought we'd cover how well these things actually work and if it's worth investing and some extra gear and to be honest an auto guider works incredibly well I was really surprised normally when I'm shooting with this lens it's 600 millimeters I can get maybe 30 seconds with sharp stars sometimes I could push it to 45 but I think beyond that I would start getting Starchild's pretty quickly so that was my baseline which is about 30 to 45 seconds it's 600 millimeters once I used my auto guider the very first night with really not understanding what I was doing I was easily able to get three minute long exposures it's 600 millimeters so that's a huge jump right out of the gate now since then I've shot a couple more nights and last night I was testing this out and I was able to get easily five-minute long exposures at 600 millimeters using the auto guider and as you can see here in these comparison images without the auto guider five minutes you're never going to get a usable shot at least with a sky gutter Pro or start adventure in most and that's why we really need an auto guider if you're gonna be shooting anywhere above 200 millimeters because we're so limited by the inaccuracy of our star trackers that it really holds us back so what I've learned over the past week or two is that an auto guider is gonna take your star tracker and elevate it to a whole nother level and you might have seen this especially relations to the telescope mounts they all recommend getting an auto keiter but like I said there's no information about a sky guide or Pro or star adventure and I'm happy to report that it works just as well as you would imagine and you're gonna get great results by using an auto guider with your sky gutter pro or star adventurer finally I want to touch on the pros and cons of Auto guiding to give you an idea if it's actually worth it for you and the first- of course is the additional cost because you're gonna be spending at least $150 most likely on your guides Auto guider probably 100 dollars or so on your guide scope kind of get an adapter as well especially around the sky got a pro that's another 50 bucks so you're looking anywhere from $300 to 350 maybe even 400 in most cases to get a full set up here then on top of that you have to think about a battery I had to buy my external battery to keep my laptop running all night that's another $250 right there again even have to spend that much but that's a significant investment it got his side is it worth it for what you're doing again you're going to be looking at a jump from 30 or 45 seconds to 4 or 5 minutes easily using an auto guider the other problem is that you're gonna have a longer set-up time not by much to be honest the still the hardest part of your night is gonna be finding your object and focusing on that still takes me the most time just because it's a pain to do with these star trackers and having to look down that's still gonna take the longest but in terms of the auto guiding setup it should only take you 15 minutes at most once you get the hang of it again you're doing that precise polar alignment that should take you 5-10 minutes you're doing your guiding that should take you 5-10 minutes and then you're done for a while anyway so increased set-up time you also have these wires now so I'll share around some other people there's definitely a chance somebody can snag this wire and cause everything to come crashing down which you want that's something you got to consider you'll have all this extra gear out to at night so if you're in a dusty environment more chance of everything getting covered in dust those are the main negatives the benefits though the first one that I noticed is that instead of having like a hundred or 200 even more photos because we're shooting shorter exposures now you could probably get away with twenty or thirty photos because if each photo is five minutes you really don't need that many exposures anymore so right there that's a huge benefit for me I know my laptop with my solid-state drive I'm always running out of space so if I can have a fraction of the photos that's really gonna help me out at night it's also going to speed up your processing time and the stacking time because it doesn't have nearly as many photos so overall that's a huge benefit also the fact that you can now shoot four or five or six minutes every single one of your photos is gonna have a lot more depth and color and detail to it and it's also going to remove thermal noise most likely and some weird artifacts that you get by not capturing enough light so that's a huge benefit there but with that in mind if anything goes wrong and let's say five minutes let's say somebody bumps the tripod a little bit there's a gust of wind The Guiding hits a hitch and it screws up if anything at all goes wrong in that three or four or five minutes you've just lost a lot of exposure time so instead maybe you can shoot one or two minute long exposures that way something goes wrong you're not losing nearly as much time just for that one photo alright well that's about all I have for you today's video and I think the big takeaway for me is just how well these auto guiders actually work I mean all I have to do is plug it in press a couple buttons in PhD 2 and I'm no longer limited to 30-second exposures I can easily shoot 5 minutes now even at 600 millimeters so it's almost like I got a brand new star tracker that performs way better than this guy got a pro ever could and that's just because we have an auto guider now sending commands here and it really does open up a whole new world of possibilities and push this thing to a whole new level so I definitely recommend getting an auto guider if you've got a big telephoto lens it's really worth the investment based on my experience and with all that in mind if you're still new to deep space astrophotography or if you've been having some trouble you should definitely check out my deep space course which at this point has over 14 hours of tutorial videos and the way I've structured this course is that there's ten main modules one for each of the objects we're gonna cover so that includes the Orion Nebula Andromeda galaxy and the veil nebula a whole lot more but what we do in each one of those modules is we first figure out where the object is in the night sky once you know that we had our own location we set everything up properly we talked about what the camera settings to use and then once you have those images you're ready to continue on into the full post processing workflow and even if you don't have the images yet or if they don't turn out as well as you would like I've included my personal TIFF files so you can actually follow along it step by step and still learn the techniques even if you don't necessarily have the images yet and really the most important point I would say are those post-processing steps because you can really take an image a long way if you know how to do some basic edits so that's something we really focus on in the course there's also even a two-hour long Auto guider course as well so we go through a lot more detail than I could today there's a troubleshooting module in there point being there's a lot of great tutorials in there and if you want to check that out it's all available over on my website I also have some specific star tracker tutorials so I've got the start sky guide or pro course for example that I was like over 12 hours of tutorials completely separate from the Deep Space course same thing with the Star adventure so if you want to learn even more about Astro photography head over to my website and check those out but if not I hope you enjoyed the video today and you learned a lot more about Auto guiding with your sky gutter pro or your Star adventure

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 140,234

Rating: 4.9417405 out of 5

Keywords: skywatcher, ioptron, skyguider pro, star adventurer, skytracker, star tracker, astrophotography, phd2, sharpcap, polar alignment, autoguiding, auto guiding, dslr astrophotography, declination bracket, peter zelinka, deep space, tutorial, use an auto-guider with the skyguider pro, photography, sky watcher, zwo asi, orion magnificent mini, polar drift align

Id: 6WuBKfo_KMo

Length: 30min 25sec (1825 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019