Autostart of PHD?

I have 2 questions about PHD and SGP: I’m still fine tuning SGP, but it’s running very good so far (autofocus, plate solving dithering etc). With my PC upgraded to Windows 7 and the latest versions of SGP and PHD I want to try an automated meridian flip this week.

A friend of mine told me that the calibration of PHD is taken care of by SGP. This should be possible with a set of decent darks to remove the hot pixels with my Lodestar. Is this true?

After a meridian flip the calibration of the declination axis is reversed. In the past I tried this too, but for some reason the guiding wasn’t that good and after a new calibration it was all right. Is it possible to automatically recalibrate PHD after a meridian flip with SGP?

This is not true. PHD handles its own image calibration. SGPro has nothing to do with it. That said, you should use dark frames fro auto guiding.

Yes, there is an option to force calibration after auto center occurs (or meridian flip in your case).

Jeroen,

Ken is right, you should definitely use either a Dark Library or a Bad-pixel map in PHD2 as this will reduce or eliminate the possibility of locking on to a hot pixel… There is a section about this in the PHD2 help file, which you can also see here: Darks_BadPixel_Maps

I personally like to use a bad-pixel map with my Lodestar since dark libraries have a temperature dependency and bad-pixel maps do not.

Andy