Contradictory answers concerning the Star Adventurer

crossovermaniac

According to Sean Wang, the ASIAir cannot be used for autoguiding the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer but the person running the Zwo official YouTube page said it could in the comment section of the ASIAir video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqh-bu--Sws

Please, clarify whether or not the ASIAir can be used to autoguide the Star Adventurer.

Sam@ZWO

ASIAIR can guide through ST4 port

But star adventurer accept RA only autoguiding

grahamf

Please can you tell me whether ASI Air automatically guides when a guide cam is configured as "On camera" and is connected via the ST4 port?

The Star Adventurer is not listed as a telescope so cannot be connected directly to ASI Air. It has no go to functions and only tracks in RA so whilst it can be guided in the RA axis there are no options in the guiding tab to select RA guiding only.

If ASI Air does not detect a telescope mount will it still send guide commands via the camera and ST4 cable?

If it does not detect any movement in the DEC drive (Star Adventurer obviously does not have one!) will it still guide in RA or will it throw up a calibration error and not send any guide commands?

Thanks.

Tech@ZWO

Q： whether ASI Air automatically guides when a guide cam is configured as "On camera" and is connected via the ST4 port? A: yes

Q：If ASI Air does not detect a telescope mount will it still send guide commands via the camera and ST4 cable?

A：Yes

Q：If it does not detect any movement in the DEC drive (Star Adventurer obviously does not have one!) will it still guide in RA or will it throw up a calibration error and not send any guide commands?

A: If you have did a perfect PA（polar alignment），the guiding can be work without the DEC drive

w7ay

Hi GrahamF:

You had asked

>> It has no go to functions and only tracks in RA so whilst it can be guided in the RA axis there are no options

>> in the guiding tab to select RA guiding only.

If you open the Guiding window, with the guiding Graph showing at the bottom of the window, you should see a row of text just above the graph that starts with "DEC Mode".

The other parameters on that line of text are DEC aggressiveness, RA aggressiveness and whether you want to see correction pulses in the guide graph.

"DEC Mode" is defaulted to "Auto" (shown in green; indicating that it is an item that can be changed by the user). "Auto" just means that DEC pulses will be generated (whether through pulse guiding, or through ST-4 guiding) for both North and South corrections.

If you click on the word Auto, it will cycle through "North," "South" and "None" and back to "Auto." With North and South selections, only north or south pulses will be generated.

What you are looking for is the "None" setting. With that setting, the PHD2 version in the ASIAIR will ignore DEC errors.

Clear skies,

Chen