Binning for OAG users

StevenEvan

Like other OAG users I have 2 problems with star images.

The stars in the guiding images look more like seagulls than nice round stars, they are very distorted due to off axis coma.
Due to the long focal length of the scope, the number of usable stars in the guide image is usually only 1 or 2.

Binning would improve both of these problems by making fainter stars brighter and decreasing the pixel size of the "seagull" stars.

Is it possible to add a Binning option for guide cameras?

Steve

Tech@ZWO

StevenEvan
Hello Steven
Problem 1 is not a problem，the OAG behaved like this due to the design and it won't affect your guiding
Problem 2 would be a good feature request, or a larger guide camera would be another solution such as 174mini

Lenoil90

@tech@zwo#46886 I already have a 174mm mini and I think that would be a nice feature, with a PC we can bin but not in asiair, thanks for considering this update, I am sure that most of OAG users will use it.

Tech@ZWO

Lenoil90
Hello，thanks for your feedback.We will consider this

Menion

I agree with @StevenEvan comment. With 1.6 and multi star with automatic stars pick up, the guide fails to consider big elongated star (HFD > 5/6) which is kind of normal with OAG on SC telescope and camera such ASI290MM

Binning would be a must for it, and also expose some PHD2 settings, maybe in a well specified advanced settings, in order to tune the logic PHD2 use to pick up the stars

AAP 1.5 worked better in this sense

Sam@ZWO

Menion manual selecting star is back in 1.6.1

StevenEvan

Hi @Sam@ZWO,
Since all ZWO guide cameras support 2x2 binning, I hope that this feature will be supported on AAP soon.
Steve.

WalterT

StevenEvan ^ Same

PMTeam@ZWO

StevenEvan Hi @Sam@ZWO,
Since all ZWO guide cameras support 2x2 binning, I hope that this feature will be supported on AAP soon.
Steve.

We are testing and optimizing this function internally.

sonofstan

@asiair@zwo#47213

StevenEvan

This is a big one for me too. On my wide-field setup with guide scope, multistar works great. On my long focal length setup with OAG, multistar picks hot pixels as stars, even when there are stars visible to me in the looping preview. I'm guessing it's because the real stars are comatic (not round) bit the hot pixels are more defined. Multistar would be very helpful at long focal lengths, binning would make this possible, as would the ability to use dark frames for the guide camera. PHD2 has both of these, why not AAP?