12
Autoguiding Software
Obviously, you can‟t just connect an imaging camera to a computer and expect it to begin
interpreting the images and put out guiding correction commands that can be sent to the mount.
That requires autoguiding software designed specifically for those tasks. In the case of the ST-4
and ST-V, proprietary autoguiding software was provided inside the electronics box. In other
cases, the astrophotographer must obtain autoguiding software and load it into the computer.
Many image acquisition and/or image processing software packages include autoguiding
software. These include MaxIM DL, MaxDSLR, CCDOps, K3CCDTools, and AstroArt. In
addition, autoguiding software programs are available as freeware. These include GuideMaster
(www.guidemaster.de/index_en.asp), GuideDog (www.barkosoftware.com/GuideDog), and
PHD Guiding (www.stark-labs.com/phdguiding.html), to name a few. One must be careful in
selecting the autoguiding software to ensure that it will dovetail properly with all the other
components of the autoguiding system you are assembling. For example, the software may not
support the type of guiding camera you are using. Alternatively, it may require an output to
communicate with your mount, such as a parallel port, that your computer does not have.
Link Between Computer and Mount
During an imaging session, the autoguiding software will interpret the position of the guide star
on the chip of guiding camera, calculate the amount of correction needed, and translated those
into electrical signals to send to the mount to make those corrections. For this to occur, the
signals have to be conducted from the computer to the mount. This requires a proper link
between the computer and the mount. The link itself has several components.
The first component is an output port on the computer. The output port can be a USB port, a
parallel port, or a serial port. The autoguiding software will let you chose which type of output
port is used, but some software may have restrictions. If your computer is responsible for doing
other tasks during imaging besides acquiring the image from the guiding camera, such as
acquiring the image from the main imaging camera and storing it in an external drive, it makes
sense to preserve certain outputs for those purposes and try to select a different type of output for
communicating with the mount. For example, all the other mentioned tasks may require USB
ports. If your computer has a parallel port, you might want to select that for communicating with
the mount so that all the USB ports are still available for the other tasks.
The second component will be a connector attached to whatever USB port, parallel port, or serial
port you have selected as the autoguider output from your computer. The job of this connector is
to route signals from the computer to the next component in the link, which is a cable. In the case
of autoguiding, it is a very specific type of cable called an RJ-11 cable (Figure 5). This cable
may be referred to as an RJ-12 cable by some.
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