A William Optics ZenithStar 66 SD Apochromatic refractor with an Atik 314L mono CCD camera at the focus, was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount, by the side of a 50mm guidescope fitted with a QHY 5L-II-M guide camera.
A Linux computer running PHD2 and an Indi server running a Celestron mount driver was used to do muti-star pulse guiding. This method of auto-guiding gives better control over the mount than ST4 guiding or pulse guiding with a single star. The effects of seeing are averaged out over the set of stars chosen by PHD2, allowing shorter guide-camera exposures to be used without ‘chasing the seeing’
Using AstroDMx Capture for macOS, 10 x 3 minute FITS exposures of M44, the Beehive cluster were made and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker with flat-fields and matching dark-frames.
Screenshot from the Fedora Linux computer doing multi-star pulse guiding.
M44, the Beehive Cluster
Multi-star auto-guiding was introduced into PHS2 in December 2020, and should improve the guiding process.
We have shown here that Multi-star auto-guiding using a Linux computer running an Indi server and imaging using AstroDMx Capture for macOS was a good working combination. However, any combination of Linux, macOS and Windows for PHD2 auto-guiding and AstroDMx Capture imaging can be used.
