Getting the best performance from my AM5: Page 23

Getting the best performance from my AM5

w7ay

matt_d The PHD log file does show a prominent 3rd RA harmonic

Oh yeah, if the amplitude of the third harmonic is of the order of 1/3 of the amplitude of the fundamental, that third harmonic will double your worse case slope (using only the fundamental), at a location where their phases coincide.

Chen

matt_d

Sadly, my telescope was discontinued in 2007, and I cannot find a published spot diagram (TV 102iis w/ field flattener). Maybe I can read about how to measure one for myself. This has been primarily a visual scope, but with the AM5 it has great grab/go potential, and now I’m doing some basic imaging with it. With your advice and others on this thread, I am averaging 0.4-0.6” RMS with a little better than average seeing tonight, so pretty happy with that.

Mike_astro

Hi! Thanks for the help of all the participants of this forum. My guiding is quite satisfactory but with random Ra and Dec peaks around 2 rms (once or twice per 300 sec). I calculated my slope at 0.18’´/s. Is it good at 100ms Ra and dec Max pulse for a 0.5s guide, Aggr arround 25%. I use a mini 290 mm asi on guide scope 200 FL. I'm thinking of using a red filter to reduce the turbulence. Here is my harmonic ratio:

CHriss

So I know ZWO is reading here, too.
After I had some pretty insurmountable issues with my brand new AM5, I've opened a thread in the PHD2 support forum.

Anyone interested in reading, here it is:
https://groups.google.com/g/open-phd-guiding/c/mpVKPaZvw7w

Interesting is Bruce' (who is "Mr. PHD2" if you don't know) final verdict:

"I think we've seen enough to know that there's something pretty substantially wrong with the mount - either the hardware or the firmware. I really think the ZWO guys should know what this is and they're probably the only ones with the necessary hardware and firmware insight to identify a root cause. We can all speculate about what it might be but who knows. Frankly, since you just got the mount, I don't know why you're continuing to fight with it - it's clearly defective in some way and it seems to me that ZWO should provide a remedy. In any case, I don't think we need to look at any more guide logs, I think our measurements are just too far away from the underlying problem."

I've sent a mail to ZWO support regarding this, they didn't come back with any response (yet).
At this point in time, I deeply regret buying that mount. It is by far the worst experience I've made im my 40+ years career of using astronomy hardware.

We'll see and I hope ZWO will help me in some way.

ASIMount@ZWO

CHriss Sorry about the trouble you meet. I'll ask our support to check your email and reply you.

ASIMount@ZWO

Jan75 The minimun move value has already changed and default in the beta version. We dindin't ask you to change it, just tell you what we changed. It's a test and we should confirm the change is useful since we didn't recur the oscillation. Thank you for your try about the beta version.

Jan75

ASIMount@ZWO Thank you for the explanation. I was talking about the guide rate (that I was asked to change to 0.25x), not about the min_move (that I know cannot be changed in Asiair). The guide rate is an option in Asiair for other mounts but not on AM5 (disabled in the current version from what I understand from other posts).

In all cases, on my side, the 2.9s-period oscillation is still present even with the beta so maybe that has nothing to do with the SW parameters you changed - just guessing. Anyways, I sent you the most recent guiding logs as requested, let me know if you need anything else from me, otherwise I will just wait for your response by email.

CHriss

ASIMount@ZWO
Thanks
The ticket was raised using a different e-mail address than the one I'm registered with here.
I don't see an option to reply directly to you. Please send me a mail to the registered e-mail, I then can reply with the e-mail adress used for the ticket.

ASIMount@ZWO

CHriss Could you show me your email's name, so our support can find your email quickly.
Thank you.

CHriss

ASIMount@ZWO
Sure, but I'd like to avoid posting that e-mail address here.
This is the body of the e-mail I got as auto-response after opening my ticket. Does that help?

Your request (9711) has been received and is being reviewed by our support staff.

To add additional comments, reply to this email.
This email is a service from ZWO. Delivered by Zendesk
[4XJGXP-NXG44]

ASIMount@ZWO

CHriss OK , thank you, I'll deliver your information to our support account.

ASIMount@ZWO

CHriss Hi, we replied your email two days later. Did you recieve it? Or maybe you can check your junk mails.

CHriss

ASIMount@ZWO
Thanks for checking but no, I never got a response. Only the auto-reply after opening the ticket.
Since I'm running my own mail-domain and mail-server, it is very easy to check the logs.

I've replied to the auto-response, maybe that helps.

CHriss

ASIMount@ZWO
I didn't get any response so far, neither by e-mail nor here :-(

ASIMount@ZWO

Jan75 The guide rate is an option in Asiair for other mounts but not on AM5

The option is on our plan. We'll release this option later.

Kevin_A

Just adding my 2 cents worth, the new beta version released to help fix inconsistant guiding did not change anything in regards to performance, if anything my mount is running worse.

ASIMount@ZWO

CHriss Sorry for that. Our support will send you an email again later.

fotosgrafiabymiguel

@w7ay - Thank you Chen for your well-written description "getting the best performance on the AM5" I used your suggestions and got the best guiding on my AM5, AA+, RedCat 51, ASI 2600MC Pro and ASI220mm Guidescope.

Do you have any guiding suggestions for AM5, AA+, Celestron EdgeHD 8, OAG w/ASI174mm and ASI533MC Pro?

Thank you in advance.

fotosgrafiabymiguel

@w7ay StarzLite Thank you Chen for your well-written description "getting the best performance on the AM5" I used your suggestions and got the best guiding on my AM5, AA+, RedCat 51, ASI 2600MC Pro and ASI220mm Guidescope.

Do you have any guiding suggestions for AM5, AA+, Celestron EdgeHD 8, OAG w/ASI174mm and ASI533MC Pro?

Thank you in advance.

w7ay

fotosgrafiabymiguel Do you have any guiding suggestions for AM5, AA+, Celestron EdgeHD 8, OAG w/ASI174mm and ASI533MC Pro?

Sorry, I do not use the ZWO mount to know how it works with an OAG, especially with an ASIAIR (assuming that is what you mean by "AA+").

To get good guiding (0.35" total RMS with an RST-135E), you need the camera to have the ablility to set an extra 20 dB of gain after getting 12 stars. I am not sure an OAG can do that.

Chen

Jan75

w7ay My own observation is that OAG makes guiding performance worse, but at this point I don't know why that is. I suspect it is the number of stars detected: the Asiair interface displays some stars with circles around them, so I'm assuming these are the ones used for guiding. So far I have never seen more than a handful circles (let's say 5-ish at best). I use the ASI ZWO 220 camera with the gain at 450. The telescope is an RC8 (at 1627 mm FL). I have seen small improvement when attaching a counter-weight.
Next time I have a clear night I will try the same setup with a guidescope and confirm that the key problem is with the number of stars used for guiding.

« Previous Page Next Page »