Auto-Guider Tutorial - SkyGuider Pro & Star Adventurer (2021 Edition)

if you're not getting the best tracking results out of your sky guide or pro or star adventure then one thing that can really help is an auto guider an auto guider is basically a really small camera that's going to talk to your star tracker and make it work much better in my experience i was able to go from sharp stars at 30 seconds with a 600 millimeter lens all the way up to sharp stars at four minutes maybe even longer at 600 millimeters that's a massive difference so for anybody thinking about using a 300 millimeter lens or higher on a sky gutter pro star adventure you'll definitely want to look into getting an auto guider and in this video i'm going to break everything down for those that have a larger go-to mount then i really wouldn't even recommend watching this video because in your case you can do a lot more advanced things with your mounts and a lot of the things i'm going to talk about are not going to be applicable to you so i'd recommend you go watch some other videos here on youtube but for those that do have a sky guide or pro or star adventure this is the video to watch let's start off and talk about what you're actually gonna need and the first thing of course is an auto guider camera i use one from zwo so that's we're gonna start talking about but there's also some other options we'll briefly mention if we head over to zwo's website we can go to the products tab and there's even a little option here for guide cameras you've got usually a couple different choices but there's no reason to spend five hundred dollars on an auto guider especially if you just have a sky gutter star adventure the 120 mini here will do a fine job and that's what i've been using for about three years now if we take a closer look at the camera you'll see it's just a little cylinder very small like ccd style camera dedicated astro camera technically and the way this thing works is there's two ports on the back of the camera there's an st4 port and a usb port the st4 this kind of looks like an ethernet cable this is what's going to send the signal to the star tracker to make it run much better the usb cable here this is going to connect to your laptop or the asir pro or maybe even another device whatever route you want to go down and that's all there is to it you just have two cables for two different connections if you saw my original video that i made for auto guiders here on youtube or if you read my article one thing i mentioned is that i had some compatibility issues with the mini here but after using it for about three years i really haven't had many problems at all and i can still recommend going for the mini i did recommend using the s because that one has usb 3.0 and therefore it might work better in some scenarios and i want to talk about the s version real quick this one isn't even listed under the guide cameras so in order to find that one we'll go to the products tab again look for the planetary cameras that's where the asi 120s is located again i originally recommended this model instead because it had usb 3.0 and that should work better on some laptops the reason i'm talking about this though is because i get asked usually once a week people have questions about how they connect this to the guide scope and for whatever reason zw includes this little wide angle lens which is i don't know why they do that but this will cause you problems and it's going to be screwed into the camera by default and this is going to screw you up so make sure anybody who has this version or they're thinking about getting the asi 120s you unscrew this wide angle lens all the black piece right here so it's just the red camera at that point you can go and grab the one and a quarter inch nose piece from the box and screw that in to the threads right here that's what's going to allow you to attach this to your guide scope and ultimately focus i want to make sure i made a specific mention on this because i get asked all the time and hopefully this helps you out again if you're thinking about getting the asi 120s for the usb 3.0 feature mainly unscrew the black wide-angle lens completely that way just the right camera and then attach the one and a quarter inch nose piece that's what's gonna allow everything to work properly for most people the asi 120 mini is going to work fine it'll save you 20 30 bucks whatever it is and that'll ultimately work just fine however the camera is only half the equation you're also going to need a guide scope of some sort again you've got a million different options you can choose from what i recommend though is one from zwo and we'll find that probably under the accessories tab here for products yeah here we go there's the zwo mini guide scope this pairs really well with either the cameras we just talked about this guide scope is very small it's very lightweight and because you have a sky gutter pro star adventure most likely and you want to be portable this is an equally portable guide scope it's not big it's not heavy and it works great and once you have both the guide scope and the auto guider you're just going to slide the auto guider into the back of the scope here and then move it forwards and backwards slowly to focus you can also loosen this red knob here and then turn the end of the guide scope that'll do the fine tuning focus so again the end of the guide scope here will turn left and right provide the red locking pieces loose and that's how you're going to fine tune your focus when you're aimed up at the stars and we'll probably cover that later on in the video because i get asked this all the time too how do you focus so we'll make sure we talk about that anyway that's all you really need to do guiding at least in terms of camera gear you need the asi 120 mini i mean you can go with anything really but that's what i use and then a guide scope of some sort and you get this one for just 100 bucks now that you've got the equipment you'll need some sort of application to control all of it i personally recommend going with the asir pro and in fact we probably should talk about this sooner you can buy a bundle where you get the asa or pro the auto guider and the guide scope all in one bundle i don't really think you save any money doing that it just makes it easier on you so it is kind of nice that zwo has that option where you get everything you need right here in one go i've been using the esir pro for about a year now and it works really well especially if you have like a dedicated astro camera you can control virtually everything from your smartphone or tablet one thing i'd like to mention about the asar pro though is that it's going to run an app on your smartphone or tablet and therefore you're going to be controlling everything including the guiding from your smartphone or tablet that's one of the features of the asr pro but i've been having some weird connection issues after my phone got i think it was the android 10 update and i've also talked with a handful of other people that have noticed similar connection problems i'm hoping zwo will fix these in the future just something to be aware of i also have an apple ipad mini that i recently bought and that has no connection issues whatsoever so again i think it's mainly an android bug more so than anything and i just wanted to make sure i mentioned that in case you are thinking about buying the sar pro if you do have an android device it's possible as of january 2021 you might have some connection issues that could be resolved and should be resolved in a future update and this brings me to the other option if you don't even want to worry about wireless connections potentially failing then you could go with a wired connection to your laptop and then use phd2 to control your guiding this is a free download for both windows and mac and it works almost identically to the asr pro in fact i think the sar pro is running basically phd2 in the background so this is really what you want to use on your laptop if you want to go that route thankfully both phd2 and the asr pro software are very easy to use you literally click like three or four buttons and it just works provides you've set things up properly which we'll cover later on and i'd recommend you know it's actually pretty hard to get your hands on an asr pro they're always on back order so if you do get your auto guider equipment you could just download phd2 on your laptop or your tablet and then run it from there and then at some point you can also get the asr pro if you want to have a wireless connection without needing your laptop out there in the field the final thing i want to mention before we move on is that i really only have experience with the two zwo auto guiders that we talked about earlier so before you ask in the comments have i heard of this one have i tried this auto guider no at least of this video i've only ever used the 2zlbo products and therefore i don't have any input on some of the other options i have had a few students use the orion magnificent mini though and this one in my experience does not work well at all the camera itself does a really poor job the guide scope here is a lot bigger and heavier and bulkier than the zwo option we looked at earlier so for those that maybe find this one online and are thinking about buying it i'd recommend you avoid it because every time i've worked with somebody who had it it was just a nightmare to deal with the zwo options are a lot better alright so we covered the two things you'll need an auto guider and a guide scope and then we talked about the software you can either go with phd2 and install this on your laptop or you can get the asir pro which you can kind of think of this is its own little laptop in a way but this is what's going to allow you to control things with an app on your smartphone or ipad or whatever tablet you might have so those are your two options and i'm going to show you both methods in this video that way you can see how they both work and maybe decide which one's going to work better and if you have any other questions they'll probably get answered later on the video so with all that out of the way let's move on now and put everything together now we're going to take a look at the gear and put it all together so we've got my asi 120 mini here just like we saw on the website and when you get your asi 120 mini you should have two of these little black adapter pieces that you want to attach i already got the small one attached to the camera i've also got this larger one right here and you can screw those both together and this is what's going to allow us to focus with the guide scopes you want to make sure you have all those attached now we can take a look at the guide scope and it's pretty simple to use we've got those two silver screws already put in on the top holes there we've got an end piece here the guide scope and the red locking knob in the middle you want to loosen that and once you've loosened it you can turn the end of the guide scope see that i can turn it one way or the other that's going to do the fine tuning of our focus so if the stars are a little bit blurry that's how you want to focus it and then lock the red ring down that way it doesn't jiggle after you've done that and then again all we're going to do is slide in the auto guide in the back here so what you'll want to do is grab your auto guider with the proper adapters attached and slide it in if you were to look very closely you could see have a little mark etched on the black adapter piece there it's very subtle but that just allows me to know roughly where the focus point is and by sliding the auto guider in and out of the guide scope that's how you're going to do your rough focusing this is what's going to ultimately bring the stars somewhat into focus is by sliding the autoguider in and out and then once you can see some stars on the screen that's when you do the fine focusing i showed you just a minute ago but once you got it locked in there you can tighten down the screws and now we're ready to connect the auto guider to our star tracker as well as our laptop or the asr pro so if you have a sky gutter pro or star adventure you're gonna see a guide input somewhere on the device you can see mine's off to the left there and you'll take your st4 cable and plug it in make sure you're plugging into the guide port at that point we're going to take the st4 cable and plug it into the back of our auto guider as you would expect it's only going to go in one way so don't force it after you've plugged in the sd4 cable now we can take the usb cable plug one end into the back of the auto guider and then plug the other end into your laptop or the asar pro the next challenge you're going to face is how to attach your auto guider and guide scope to your camera gear for all those using a telescope this should be fairly simple you can get a handlebar accessory like you see here on my william optics space cat telescope and then that's how you're going to attach your guide scope pretty easy to do in my case i'm just going to slide the guide scope in tighten down the two silver screws so it doesn't fall off and i'm all set on the other hand if you plan on using a dslr this is going to be a little bit more complicated originally i decided to use a hot shoe mount to connect my guide scope to the camera this was not as sturdy or reliable as i would have liked so i soon ditched that method now what i do is attach the guide scope to my camera's l bracket and this works much better you will need some additional components to go this route i've already created a full video here on youtube that will explain everything you need along with the links to those products and how to set it all up and i'll have a link for that video in the description as well as a little pop-up in the upper right corner but once you have all the components you need you can just clip this whole thing now to your camera's l bracket this gives you a very sturdy and secure connection and it'll work fine for most people i've shown you two different ways you can attach your guide scope and auto guider to your camera gear you can always do some research on your own to maybe find an alternate way that might work better in your scenario however you have to do it though find a secure way to attach your guide scope and auto guider and then you're ready to move on and we're going to talk about the software that you'll need to control everything we're going to start off with phd2 on the laptop after we've covered that then we'll move on to the asar pro in this case with phd2 if you've just installed it for the first time you're gonna have to go through the initial wizard where you select the camera that you have hopefully you've got the latest version of phd2 if you do you should be able to find zwo aside camera and you can choose that from the list this is of course assuming you have the 120 mini that i'm personally using or that 120s that i briefly talked about earlier in the video if you have another option that i didn't talk about you might find it here in the list and i'd always recommend heading over to phd2's website they do have a list of compatible auto guiders if you want to learn more about that but if you're trying to keep things simple and you have the same camera as me click on zwo asi camera if it's connected in my case it is i've connected it to the usb port on my laptop we'll hit yes and there we go it successfully found the pixel size of my auto guider if for some reason that fails and you've got the usb cable connected you can always find this number on the product page for your camera there's like a little u m which stands for micrometers micrometers whatever you want to call it and in this case mine is 3.75 we'll leave the bending level at one and the guide scope focal length you'll need to know this one it's going to depend of course on the guide scope that you purchased if you have the zwo guide scope that i mentioned in this video that is 120 millimeters for whatever reason they say 30 millimeter f4 that's like the diameter of i think the scope but you're looking for the focal length and that's where it gets kind of confusing so again make sure if you have the same guide scope as me you put in 120. if you've got all that taken care of we'll hit next now it's going to ask us for the mount that we plan on using i'm assuming you're using a sky gutter pro or star adventure if you're watching this video and if that's the case you'll want to put this to on camera if you have a go to mount though you can always choose one of the as-com options or something else but for sky gutter pro and star adventure users put on camera the mount guide speed it says here if you don't know the mount guide speed just use the default of 0.5 with that all taken care of we'll hit next again now it's asking us for an auxiliary mount we don't have anything like that in our scenario so hit next if you read through this what it's telling you is that whenever you move the scope or the camera around for example let's say you start photographing the orion nebula for an hour and then you try and photograph the horse head nebula and you move your camera you would need to go in and recalibrate the software in other words you just close out a phd2 completely and restart it so every time you move the camera around while you're doing some shooting at night you'll need to recalibrate the software because it's not smart enough we'll talk about that more later on in this case i'll just hit proceed we don't have any adaptive optics i'll hit next and now we can create a profile i'd recommend naming this whatever your auto guider is in my case asi 120 monochrome mini and if you'd like you can build a dark library this should give you a little bit better performance at night so it's not a bad idea and as long as that eject will hit finish it should now ask us to take our dark frames and the way this is going to work is it's going to take five photos at one second one and a half two three etc and these dark frames will be automatically subtracted from your previews if you're going to do this though make sure no lights coming at the guide scope or that's going to ruin everything the guide scope should have come with some type of cap i recommend you put that on you might even want to throw a shirt or something over the guide scope that way no light can get in at all and maybe even wait until night to do this if you screw it up you can always reset it and take them again in the future but it's better to just do them correctly the first time and never have to worry about it again so in my case i'm going to grab the little cap put it over the front of my guide scope and then throw a shirt over the entire setup that way no light can leak in and once i've done that i can click start it looks like our dark frames are now complete i'll hit ok and that's all there is to it unfortunately there's no way to see if the dark frames were actually any good or if any light leaked in so if you do notice some weird problems at night you might want to retake those darks but as long as everything looks okay you shouldn't have to worry about what i'd like you to do now is verify that all of your settings are correct before we go any further the first thing i would do is go to the bottom and change the exposure duration to three seconds that's a good starting point in other words every three seconds the auto guider will take a photo and then send a command to your star tracker with an update if you were to put this to 10 seconds for example then the auto guider would only take a photo and send a correction every 10 seconds and that probably wouldn't be a good idea for guiding on the other hand if you did 0.1 seconds or one second that might be too fast to even get a good look at the stars because not enough light is coming in and you're going to be sending commands so frequently of the star tracker that you might just start running into problems therefore what most people tend to agree on is a 2 or three second long exposure that's kind of the sweet spot in a lot of scenarios feel free to mess around on your own and see what works best for you i've always just stuck with three seconds and that seems to work okay if we go over to the right you're gonna notice a little brain this is how we get to the advanced settings and we'll need to do that before we move on when you get into the advanced settings all we really care about is the algorithms tab if you are going to be using a sky guide or pro or star adventure you need to verify that the deck guide mode is set to off the reason we're putting this to off is because a sky gutter pro or star adventure doesn't have an automated declination access like a go to mount would really what that means is that if you left this on on either auto or north or south you would never be able to actually guide because it's waiting for a command that your star tracker can't give and if you have been ringing your problems either guiding make sure that this is turned off that could explain a lot of your problems everything else should be fine we're just going to stick with the default algorithm here that's the nice thing you know this has so many advanced features but if you're like me you don't want to deal with any of that you just want it nice and simple and usually with the default settings everything's going to work fine now that we've turned off the deck guiding mode we'll hit ok the last thing i'd like to do is get our workspace a little bit more organized and to do that we'll go to view display graph then we'll also add in the target or the star profile you can do both in fact so display star profile display target this will come in handy later on but this is kind of how you want your interface to look the graph down here is where you're going to be spending most of your time looking at this is going to contain all the information you need to see how your guiding is performing and the way you want to think about this is we have plus 1 seconds plus 2 plus 3 minus 1 two and three you can change the values here maybe even so now you're seeing two four and six seconds or even higher four eight and twelve seconds i'd recommend you leave it on probably the four value here four seconds or eight seconds if you have a skyguard or pro or star adventure what these numbers translate to is the accuracy of the tracking when this starts you're going to see a red and a blue line here it's going to be jumping up and down if you can stay between plus and minus two kind of like this motion here then you know you could probably shoot three four five minutes up to 600 millimeters because of the whole arc second equations this is getting way more complicated and i do talk about this in my article which i'll link in the description i've also got some other videos which will go into more detail all you need to know is that if you can stay between even plus and minus 4 on this graph you should be fine if you're jumping to plus and minus eight seconds though which is even going beyond this that's when you might start to notice star trails because most likely there's a gust of wind that's blowing your camera or the ground you're shooting on isn't very solid or there's something seriously wrong with your mount or the way you've balanced your camera gear in almost every scenario though with the default settings and a sky gutter approached or adventure you should be good between plus and minus four or six seconds in the worst case scenario we'll look at all this more later on once we're actually guiding i just want to briefly explain what this is i want to be very clear about your workflow when you're using an auto guider you're still going to go through all the same steps that you normally would for your astrophotography you know you're going to do your pull alignment you're going to center up the object that you want to photograph you're going to focus everything and then once you're ready to start taking your photos that's when you want to start up the guiding not anytime sooner the guiding is so sensitive that you actually don't even want to touch the camera while it's running which will cause some problems but we'll talk about that here in a few minutes i just wanted to be clear that you understood the entire workflow when you're using an auto guider at this point the rosette nebula is centered up in the frame and i verified the image is nice and sharp now i can begin the guiding through phd2 or the asera pro once the guiding is running and i'm getting better tracking then i can figure out how long i can shoot without star trails and then from there i can figure out the iso or the gain and finally begin taking my images we're finally ready to begin guiding in phd2 before we do that though i want to show you something that might help you out if you go to the lower right here you should be able to find this night light feature and that will dim the screen and also make it more orange which will be easier on your eyes so i would recommend doing this if you have a windows 10 laptop and also you can turn on the brightness of the overall screen while you're in here both of these things will make it a little bit easier to have your laptop out there in the dark but of course that is one downside of this method is you have a giant bright screen out there which will not only distract you in some cases it might bother other people if you're in a crowded area so make sure you turn on that nightlight feature and lower the screen brightness before you get into phd2 provided you're aimed up at the object you want to photograph and the star tracker is turned on the first thing to do is click the connect button here in the lower left that will allow you to connect your camera in the mount here in the application so we'll just hit connect for the camera connect for the mount and at this point we're ready to go if you have any problems here it might be because you don't have a cable connected properly so make sure you double check all your cables and verify that the star tracker is turned on and then we can close out of that window step two is to click the begin looping button in the lower left it's the two arrows that will trigger your auto guider to begin taking photos so after you click begin looping you should see some stars appear on the screen provided you've already done a rough focusing with the guide scope and you're aimed up at some bright stars remember the auto guider is going to take a photo every three seconds in this case and you can always change that by adjusting the exposure down here i recommend you stick with three seconds though that means there will be some lag here because it's only going to update every three seconds if you're having trouble seeing the stars and the screen is very dark then that's probably because your gamma is not set correctly you'll notice i'm moving that slider at the bottom of the screen if you move it further to the left that'll make the image brighter and allow you to see the stars better so i'd recommend you do that and just move the gamma until the screen looks fairly bright now that we're looping exposures this would be a good time to focus the auto guider in guide scope i showed you that process towards the start of the video you're just going to slide the auto guider in and out of the guide scope that's for the rough focusing until you can see some stars then you lock it down loosen the red knob and then turn the end of the guide scope left and right until the stars are fairly sharp at that point once you have sharp stars you can move on if you can see some stars you're ready for step 3 which is selecting the star you want to guide on the easiest way to do that is to click the little star icon in the lower left and that will choose the best star for you in this case it shows that one there on the left however you can always click on a star manually to choose it if you're a beginner though you're probably better off sticking with the auto selected star and then for step four you're going to click the begin guiding button looks like a green crosshair that will tell the auto guider to begin the calibration process and you'll see that with the two yellow lines there that indicates it's doing its initial calibration while this calibration is running it's really important you don't touch anything even walking around the tripod could be enough to mess this thing up so i recommend you sit down and relax and let it go to work this should only take about five minutes to complete you'll notice the dotted lines move upwards in this case and then we'll move back down to the center of the star that's what you want to see happen if you're sitting out here for 10 minutes and the lines are still going upwards or something goes wrong there's a couple different reasons why that might have happened first your star tracker is not turned on if the tracker is not turned on then none of this is going to work that would be the first thing i would look at next make sure that all your cables are connected properly you should have the usb cable going from your auto guider to your laptop and then that st4 cable going from your auto guider to the star tracker as long as both of those are connected properly you should be fine another thing i want to draw your attention to is that it says west step 12 13 14 15 whatever it says at the very lower left west step and then the number that indicates that you're in the beginning portion of the calibration and those numbers should be going upwards again west step one two three four usually all the way up to about 20. once it hits the top of the numbering scheme whatever it decides for the knight then it'll change to east step let's say 20 again and it should start counting back down to zero therefore if it says west you're still kind of in the initial stages of the calibration if it says east that should mean you're kind of nearing the end and the dot line should be going back towards the star i'm going to speed the rest of this process up so we don't waste all of our day looking at it eventually as long as the calibration succeeds the yellow dot lines will turn green and you have now officially begun guiding at this point you should see a blue and a red line appear on your graph at the bottom of the screen the blue line stands for our right ascension that's the main axis of rotation on our star tracker and that's really the only thing we care about is the blue line the red line refers to the declination axis which we have no control over we turned it off earlier in the video so don't worry about the red line really only focus on the blue line if you had a go-to mount though both lines would be important if you feel like your guiding's just not working properly you could come down here and adjust these various settings if you hover over it it'll tell you what to do you can probably find a lot of information out on the internet about different settings to try to be honest i usually just leave mine at the defaults and i tend to get good results but it's worth investigating these various settings just remember the deck ones won't have any effect because we've turned off the declination axis so really only the first three boxes are of any importance to us the only thing left to talk about is of course the graph that's the most important thing and the way you want to think about this is that blue line remember you want to have it roughly between plus and minus four arc seconds that should give you good results even up to about 600 millimeters in this case it already jumped way off the screen it's above six arc seconds of air that means if i was taking a photo i probably would have noticed some blurry stars because the guiding isn't accurate enough to shoot very long exposures at a high focal length one of the reasons your lines might be jumping around maybe as bad as you see here or worse is because you're shooting on a windy night that will blow the guider and mess up the lines here another problem and this is what i was doing i was shooting on a deck a wooden deck that was not sturdy at all so even if i would shift my weight slightly that would ultimately move the tripod a little bit and mess with the guiding like i said this is very sensitive and you don't even want to touch the camera at all because that will really cause the graph to go crazy you might even lose the star and have to start over usually what i do is just let the graph run for about 20 or 30 seconds make sure that things look okay and give the graph time to calm down a little bit at that point i can begin taking my photos as i mentioned earlier though if i go and touch my camera it's going to cause the graph to spike and really screw things up so i always recommend if you have to touch the camera maybe to focus something or to actually begin taking your photos you want to come in here and stop the guiding that will just make your life a lot easier in the long run so stop the guiding if you have to touch the camera do whatever you have to do maybe start the interval on your remote then you can click begin looping again in the lower left you can clear out the graph just to get rid of all the junk click the begin guiding button because our star was already selected and we don't do the calibration again we already did it so now what it's going to do is begin our guiding again remember the reason i went through those extra steps is just because whenever you touch the camera it could really mess up your guiding and it might even yell at you a little bit so better you just stop the guiding completely do what you got to do then restart the guiding as i just showed you should only take you about 10 seconds you'll notice the graph's already looking a lot better now and we can let this run at this point our camera should be taking photos of the nebula or the galaxy we want we notice we have pretty good guiding at least we did and now what i would actually do is just kind of take a step back away from the camera make sure i'm not messing with it and let it run i would recommend coming out here every 15 or 20 minutes and checking your graph that's to give you a pretty good idea of how your images are going if you have a really good line on the graph you probably are getting good tracking results however if you see the screen flashing red like you see here and it says start lost that means something really bad happened and you're no longer going to be guiding which means you probably have star trails if you noticed that problem you'd want to stop the interval on your camera as well as stopping the guiding here in phd 2. it's not the end of the world if this happens just remember to restart the guiding restart your interval on your camera and then be a little bit more diligent checking it and verify it doesn't happen again and that's how you do your guiding in phd too i know there was a lot of information i just threw out you and you might still be a little bit confused so before we continue on i want to recap what we just did very briefly and make sure we're all on the same page the auto guided workflow is just an extension of your normal workflow with the star tracker so the point where you would normally start taking your photos that's when you want to start a phd2 run through the guiding calibration once that calibration step completes and you see the blue and red lines on your graph then you can go back to your camera and try and find your maximum shutter speed without star trails and since you're guiding now you're gonna get much better tracking results so you could probably shoot as long as three four or five minutes at 600 millimeters and when that photo completes just zoom in all the way double check that the stars are still sharp and if so you can now begin taking your full interval of images just remember the auto guider is so sensitive that when you touched your camera you probably messed up the guiding so that's why you want to stop the guiding restart it and at that point everything should be running your camera should be running the interval now and the guiding should be running and all you have to do is just check things periodically and make sure there's no problems next we're going to look at how to do your guiding entirely on a smartphone or tablet with the help of the asir pro so i'm assuming you've already got the sar pro turned on all the cables are attached your star tracker is turned on you're aimed up at the object you want to photograph and you're ready to go we're going to go to our wi-fi settings on our phone and connect to the asir's wi-fi network then we can start up the asa air app on our smartphone i've already got a couple different videos that go into more detail on the sar pro i'd recommend you go watch those for more information we're just going to cover the basics in this video thankfully the general process is almost identical to phd2 and therefore if you know how to do one you know how to do the other the first thing we need to do in this case is set up our main settings and you'll need to choose your mount your camera your guide camera etc you can choose your mount from any one of the options listed below if you have a go to mount if you have a skyguard pro or star adventure though choose on camera st4 for the mount then you'll notice down below we have main scope focal length and guide scope focal length the zwo guide scope has 120 millimeter focal length which i've already got inputted there and then the guide camera needs to be selected as your guide camera in my case the 120 mini if all that's really taken care of we can hit enter and we're ready to move on and begin our guiding because i didn't have an actual camera connected to my asr pro it automatically started me off in the guiding interface which we see here that's actually a nice feature however if you did have a dslr or a dedicated astro camera connected you might be starting off in this interface right here the way you want to swap to the guiding interface is to click the guide button on the left you'll see a graph if you double click on the graph now you're in the guiding interface that can be a little bit confusing so make sure you practice along with that as long as you're in the guiding interface you can follow along with me and before we even worry about begin looping and guiding on all that i want to talk about the buttons at the top of the screen there's like a telescope icon and if we click on that you'll notice that the telescope is on camera st4 really that just means our mount i don't know why they call it a telescope but make sure on camera sd4 selected and the switch is turned on otherwise you might get some weird problems a lot of people overlook that small fact now i'd like you to click on that little circular button above the telescope and these are our guide settings same thing here you want to verify that your auto guider has been set correctly here in my case i'm using the 120 mini and the switch is turned on if you get a problem here could just because the usb cable isn't connected properly the gain that's kind of like the iso of the camera you want that fairly high i usually recommend 75 to 80. that works well for me and remember the guide skill focal length in this case is 120 millimeters everything else i just leave on the default settings and i want to make sure i draw your attention to the auto restore calibration button if that's turned on then you're going to encounter a lot of problems in the future especially if you're on a skyguard or pro or star adventure therefore i recommend everybody come in here and verify that auto restore calibration is turned off like you see there otherwise you will run into some problems from here on out the workflow is going to be very similar to phd2 you're going to click the begin looping arrows on the right that should show you a real-time preview from your auto guider for some reason though i couldn't see any stars whatsoever and this might happen to you i'm thinking this might be again related to that android 10 update i think it was on my smartphone which seems to have caused a couple different problems with the asir pro app it just seems not to be as reliable as it used to be if things were working properly this is what you would see after you click begin looping you see the stars you can just tap on one with your finger that you think is going to work well and then you click the begin guiding icon over on the right remember that looks like the crosshair at that point it would go through and do the calibration notice there it says the deck guide is off and i hit confirm you want to make sure you do the same thing because we only have the skyguard or pro or star adventurer we need to leave the deck guide mode turned off i've sped this process up so you don't have to waste your whole time once it successfully completes though it'll show us the graph like it would in phd2 and just like in phd2 we need to verify that the deck mode is turned off if it's not turned off then frankly you probably didn't even make it through the calibration steps that we just saw and at any time you can click that graph button over on the center left of the screen that'll bring up the graph window and that's how you'll turn off the deck mode just by clicking on it a few times until it says off and then you can try restarting everything and now it should work if you're running into problems and from here it's going to be exactly the same as phd2 we have a red line for our declination a blue line for a right ascension really all we care about is the blue line and as long as it's between plus and minus four you should be fine to shoot up to three or four minutes at 600 millimeters in my experience that concludes my 2021 edition of the autoguider tutorial hopefully if you have a skyguard or pro or star adventure you now have a much better idea of how this whole process works and if you're thinking about getting an auto guider i hope you see that's really not that difficult there's just a few little problems you might encounter along the way that you need to troubleshoot for more information you can always check out my deep space course or my star tracker courses on my website those both have a lot more information including the full setup process how to take the photos some more tips on using the asar pro how to edit your images and much more so if you are still feeling a little bit confused and you've watched all my other youtube videos be sure to check out my courses on my website or even my patreon which is just 10 bucks a month and that has completely separate tutorials from anything else you'll find and that's a really good resource at this point there's over probably 40 videos at this point on there either way that's all i got for you today thanks for watching and i'll see you in another video

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 94,095

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Id: 4_F72Uf0yaU

Length: 39min 31sec (2371 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021