Would a QHY-5 guider be usable for multi target sequence?

Hi, the QHY-5 is an 8 bit guider and it works well with my current imaging software as long as I manually select the guide star. I can script my software to image multiple targets. The problem I am facing is that if I let the software choose the guide star it selects the brightest star in the field and that is usually a saturated star which gives poor results. Getting a 12 to 16 bit camera would solve the problem. For reasons I don’t want to get into I’m not interested in QHY and ZWO. So rather then putting out 5 to 6 hundred dollars for a new guider is anyone using a QHY-5 or Original Orion Star shoot guider for unattended multi target imaging with SGP and PHD and getting good guiding?
-Iver

i don’t see why they wouldn’t work. I only upgraded after I went to an OAG.

I guess what I want to know is will PHD and SGP be able to select an unsaturated usable guide star or do I just need a better guider? As I said my current software selects the brightest star 255 ADU which does not work well.

Your camera doesn’t have anything to do with what your software is selecting for a guide star. I’ve used/owned both of those cameras and while they’re not the most sensitive in the world, they work just fine with PHD.

Were you using something other than PHD? PHD2 does a pretty good job of selecting the right star to guide on automatically.

@Iver

Nobody is kicking you out of this thread (meaning you can feel free to continue to discuss it here), but you may have better luck on the PHD2 boards if this question is really about how PHD2 determines the best star to select (SGPro does not choose it… it simply asks PHD2 to pick one).

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I think I just didn’t ask my question clearly. I just want to know if using an 8bit guider with SGPro and PHD2 is multi target unattended imaging reliable. A can do that now with my current set up however if there is a saturated star in the guiders field of view it will be selected because its the brightest star. The guider works very well if I choose a non saturated guide star. I was told that with at least a 12bit camera this would not be an issue. So is it worth my time to demo SGPro and PHD2 to see if my guider is usable?

Why don’t you just try PHD2 and see if it works? You could test it for free and try SGP later on.

What are you using currently?

I’ll do that just waiting for some clear skies.

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