How to - Calibrate the guider to your mount
Guider Calibrate button
The above view is used to calibrate the guider software to that of the mount and tele-
scope optics used by the Starfish camera. Basically, the software has to figure out how
guide corrections need to be communicated to your telescope mount. When capturing
images and looking at the position of the guide star within the image, the software can
determine if the guide star position has changes from frame to frame. It will also know
how much of a position change has occurred but only in pixel size units of the image.
The star centroid calculation can compute the star
’
s position to within a fraction of a
pixel element but it does not know how a pixel
’
s size relates to the absolute position of
the guide star in the sky. That is because different optical paths will produce different
fields of view of the image. In addition, the program does not know how to command
the telescope mount to move in order to correct for guide star position errors. All of this
information is learned by performing a calibration operation.
The calibrate operation is performed by commanding the telescope
’
s mount to slew the
scope in both N/S and W/E directions while simultaneously taking pictures of the guide
star and analyzing it
’
s position changes.
fishcamp engineering
Starfish
Guide Camera
