Horoscope 17 April 2021, Your Daily Astroguide Horoscope Today and Free Daily Horoscope, know what your stars say. Astro Art 6.0 - A complete software package for image processing, camera and telescope control, photometry, astrometry and image stacking. AstroGuider - AstroGuider is a simple to use guiding application for your telescope mount. It can be calibrated semi-automatically or manually, you do not need to take care about camera orientation or pixel scale.

If you are even reasonably serious about doing some astrophotography you will eventually want an autoguider and guide scope to make sure your images are as sharp as possible. Although these are used together, they are two different items but I will try to keep it all in packages to make it easy for you.

What does an autoguider and guide scope do?

An autoguider is basically a camera that can either connect to your mount or a computer and tracks a specific star. When the selected star moves more than a specified amount away from the spot where it is supposed to be in the images the camera takes, it tells the mount to move a certain amount to keep that star dead in the center of the frame.

This makes sure that your mount is tracking the stars as accurately as possible and by doing so, makes sure that your images are as sharp as possible. This is because as a mount tracks an object, it can be off just a tiny bit. When this happens you get movement of the image in the camera making the objects blurry. This might just be a tiny bit, but using an autoguider can solve this problem.

The guide scope is a small telescope, sometimes as small as a finder, which the camera uses to see the stars.

Now lets take a look at some telescope reviews!

Best autoguider and guide scope packages

Astromania has always been a great source for inexpensive astronomy gear and their Astromania Camera Easy Autoguiding Set50 shows why. Included is everything you need to get started guiding including the camera, rings, mount, 50mm guide scope, cables, drivers, and more.

The good news is that this is a really nice setup that can save you quite a bit when compared to other kits such as the Orion models below. The bad news is that these seems to be of a little cheaper construction and have a much lower quality control than the Orion versions with several people reporting some pretty substantial issues that prevent the use of the products.

If I didn’t mind futzing around with it to fix little issues and the possibility of having to do an exchange, then saving the money sure seems tempting. This is particularly true since Astromainia has always been an excellent company to deal with.

For a long time the default standard for all new astrophotographers was to get the Orion Starshoot autoguider, and that is still one of the most popular choices. Not only is this true because they work very well and are supported by virtually every software guiding package out there, but also because they are one of the few manufacturers who put together complete kits for you. Let’s take a look at a few of these Orion kits.

Without a doubt the easiest way to add an autoguider and guide scope to your setup is this Orion Magnificent Mini AutoGuider Package. With this package all you do is slide the guide scope into your existing finder mount, insert the Orion autoguider camera into the back of the guide scope, plug it in, and turn it on!

Sure you then have to either plug it directly into your mount or into your computer and configure the tracking software but at least installation of the package could not be easier.

This setup has been proven for years and I have seen it give excellent results with virtually all types of telescopes including short and long refractors, Newtonians, and even SCTs.

You would be hard pressed to find anything that works this well for this amount of money.

Need a bigger guide scope for more options on guide stars? This Orion CT80 80mm Refractor Starshoot AutoGuider Package has you covered. They took the tried and true Starshoot autoguider camera and mated it with their 80mm short tube refractor, added in a Vixen style rail and tube rings to give you an amazing autoguiding package.

This package is excellent for larger telescopes or for areas where there is a lot of light pollution and you have trouble finding stars to guide off of. I have used one of these for years and it always does an excellent job.

The last Orion kit we will talk about is their newer Orion Starshoot AutoGuider Pro & 60mm Guide Scope Package. This kit contains their latest Starshoot Autoguider Pro camera which improves on the sensitivity of the older Starshoot camera and also reduces the weight.

They have paired this new camera with a very nice 60mm guidescope complete with tube rings, a Vixen finder mount rail, and a very nice helical focuser.

While probably not as compatible with guiding software as the older Starshoot camera, it is compatible with PHD which is overwhelmingly the most popular autoguider software out there. It also has a port for connecting directly to your mount if that is how you guide.

This kit would probably be as good or better than the previous kit with the 80mm scope and would do it being much lighter and easier to deal with.

It's been a good three years now since I swapped my HP laptop for a Macbook Pro. In the mean time, I've started doing a bit more astrophotography and of course the change of operating system has affected the tools I use to obtain and process photos.

Amateur astronomers have traditionally mostly used Windows, so there are a lot of Windows tools, both freeware and payware, to help. I used to run the freeware ones in Wine on Ubuntu with varying levels of success.

When I first got the Mac, I had a lot of trouble getting Wine to run reliably and eventually ended up doing my alignment and processing manually in The Gimp. However, that's time consuming and rather fiddly and limited to stacking static exposures.

However, I've recently started finding quite a bit of Mac OS based astrophotography software. I don't know if that means it's all fairly new or whether my Google skills failed me over the past years :-)

Software

I thought I'd document what I use, in the hope that I can save others who want to use their Macs some searching.

Some are Windows software, but run OK on Mac OS X. You can turn them into normal double click applications using a utility called WineSkin Winery.

Obtaining data from video camera:

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• oaCapture (MacOS X, free)
• AstroImager (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)

Format-converting video data:

• Handbrake (Mac OS X, free, open source)

Processing video data:

• AutoStakkert! (Windows + Wine, free for non-commercial use, donationware)

Obtaining data from DSLR:

• AstroDSLR (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)

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Processing and stacking DSLR files and post-processing video stacks:

• RegiStax (Windows + Wine, free)
• Nebulosity (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)

Post-processing:

• The Gimp (Max OS X, free, open source)

Telescope guiding:

• AstroGuider (Mac OS X, payware, free trial)
• PHD2 (Mac OS X, free, open source)

Hardware

A few weeks ago I bought a ZWO ASI120MC-S astro camera, as that was on sale and listed by Nebulosity as supported by OSX. Until then I'd messed around with a hacked up Logitech webcam, which seemed to only be supported by the Photo Booth app.

Astroguide Mac

I've not done any guiding yet (I need a way to mount the guide scope on the main scope - d'oh) but the camera works well with Nebulosity 4 and oaCapture. I'm looking forward to being able to grab Jupiter with it in a month or so and Saturn and Mars later this year.

The image to the right is a stack of 24x5 second unguided exposures of the trapezium in M42. Not too bad for a quick test on a half-moon night.

Settings

Astroguide

I've been fiddling with Nebulosity abit, to try and get it to stack the RAW images from my Nikon D750 as colour. I found a conversion matrix that was supposed to be decent, but as it turns out that made all images far too blue.

The current matrix I use is listed below. If you find a better one, please let me know.

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R	G	B
R	0.50	0.00	1.00
G	0.00	1.00	0.00
B	1.00	0.00	0.50