A William Optics ZenithStar 66 SD Apochromatic refractor with an Atik 314L mono CCD camera at the focus, was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount with a 50mm guidescope fitted with a QHY 5L-II-M guide-camera.
A Fedora Linux computer running PHD2 and an Indi server running a Celestron mount driver was used to do muti-star pulse guiding. This method of auto-guiding, which was incorporated into PHD2 in December 2020, gives better control over the mount than ST4 guiding or pulse guiding with a single star. The effects of seeing are averaged out over the set of stars chosen by PHD2.
Click on an image to get a closer view.
Using AstroDMx Capture for macOS, 10 x 3 minute FITS exposures of M44, the Beehive cluster were made and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker with flat-fields and matching dark-frames.
Screenshot from the Fedora Linux computer doing multi-star pulse guiding.
M44, the Beehive Cluster
This experiment was done using a Linux computer for the auto-guiding and AstroDMx Capture for macOS for capturing; but any combination of Windows, Linux and macOS computers could equally well have been used.
Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin
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