Well its very handy for those long animations of an active region or prominence. I typically have to re-adjust my framing every few frames and over the course of a couple of hours this can become a pain, and you end up with drift causing the loss of part of the image when stacking.
I had looked into the Hinode solar guider but it's been out of stock in the UK for a while and it is expensive, so when the phd2.planetary project came along I was very interested, this is a custom version of phd2 for solar, lunar, and planetary imaging.
The project is still in beta testing and the version I used was RC5 so they are getting close to a full release.
I made a filter with Baader solar film ND5 for my guidescope and tested exposures with an ASI120MM I had lying about doing nothing. The image was far too bright at minimum exposure & gain so I added a continuum filter on the camera nosepiece which got me a useable result although the exposures were still surprisingly short at 5ms
I am very familiar with phd2 for seep sky imaging so I found things quite easy to set up, there is a guide at https://github.com/Eyeke2/phd2.planetary/wiki The only new bit was a button beside the "brain button" (with a sun/moon icon) which allows you to configure the Edge detection threshold and a "time lapse" which stops phd2 trying to make adjustments at the solar exposure rate. Essentially, phd2 will check guide position every (exposure_rate + time_lapse)ms, In deep sky, you'd be aiming between 0.5s and 5s depending on the mount type. I tested this with a 1000ms timelapse.
I had a nice sunny day for testing on Saturday the 18th although the seeing wasn't great and noticeably deteriorated during the test run of 1hr 50min.
There wasn't a huge amount of action going on but I did catch a nice little flare.
Setup was a skywatcher ED120, Quark chromosphere and ASI174MM with a Baader 35nm Ha filter as an internal ERF.
Guidescope was an Astro essentials 60mm with an ASI120MM.
Mount was a ZWO AM5
To cut this short, it works, and it works well, I am sure there is room for improvement as I tinker with the settings but my 120mm rig stayed bang on target for the near 2 hours of my run without any intervention from me. The guide figures wouldn't be acceptable for deep sky but are fine for Solar.
Thanks to all involved in the project, you have done a fantastic job.
As a bonus it has saved my £750 on buying a Hinode so does it replace a Hinode?
Not necessarily, if you want to be as mobile as possible or don't want to be running a laptop or carry a guide scope with 2nd camera etc.
If, like me, you just work from a "garden observatory" phd2,planetary is ideal.
The setup
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AR3685 animation in Halpha by Robert Parsons, on Flickr[/url]
