MetaGuide Collimation and Guiding

MetaGuide

by Frank Freestar8n

Collimate on the Airy pattern even in mediocre seeing

Better guiding with a mid-range mount using low latency video and novel centroiding

Don't just guide easily - guide well

Simple, accurate calibration with a single button

A very different way to guide with better results and tighter stars

Monitor your guiding on a different computer over your local network

Detailed guide plots updated every 0.5 seconds for better tuning

Rotator angle support. Calibrate once, then change rotator angle and guide without recalibration

Permanent hot pixel storage and improved hot pixel detection

Integrated with NINA and Sequence Generator Pro

Easily controlled from other apps, including Python, via windows messaging

Automatic handling of meridian flip

Support for FlexRX tool to correct for flexure when using a guidescope.

SEEING measurement

FOCUS dialog

Additional images in my AstroBin gallery


MetaGuide is a video-based tool for precise collimation using the in-focus diffraction pattern of a star. MetaGuide also autoguides and has several novel features that allow optimal guiding of mid-range mounts under typical seeing conditions. MetaGuide can provide insight into both the optics of your telescope, and the tracking behavior of your mount.

MetaGuide allows me to obtain sub-2" fwhm stars with a Celestron CGE and 11" SCT at 2800mm f.l. and 0.45" per pixel. The key is an accurate and low latency centroid that can be chased aggressively to overcome gearbox and bearing noise. This pushes autoguiding of a mid-range mount into a realm of performance that normally requires adaptive-optics.

MetaGuide is free, easy to use, works with any type of telescope, and most video cameras.

MetaGuide has many unique features, such as realtime measurement of flexure between two telescopes. This allows direct observation and measurement of flexure and mirror flop. MetaGuide also has a novel proactive guiding feature that locks onto specific high frequency gearbox or gear tooth terms that can be more of an issue than periodic error. MetaGuide also uses a novel form of "Lucky" centroiding to help determine a more accurate centroid that can be guided aggressively.

MetaGuide is highly quantitative, and provides live measurements of the radial profile of a star and its full-width at half-maximum for comparison to diffraction theory. It also measures drift, to aid polar alignment.

Although based on video guiding, MetaGuide can stack frames to create the effect of a long exposure that reaches faint guide stars. It also finds faint guide stars in the field and highlights them automatically. This avoids the user having to squint at the screen to find a guide star and then select it. When the guidestar is not faint, MG does not simply stack the exposures, but instead studies the centroid of each video frame and calculates the optimum centroid for the stack.

For the guiding component of MetaGuide, an ASCOM connection is required.

What does MetaGuide do?

  • Allows a high power view of a star and its diffraction pattern even when seeing is not ideal
  • Shows a "coma dot" over the live star that guides collimation so the user just centers the dot over the star. This takes the guesswork out of collimation while keeping it interactive and realtime
  • Compares the observed diffraction pattern with theory, including secondary obstruction effects
  • Provides a simple "dump" of the raw and steady images of the star, along with a plot that shows how the stellar profile compares to theory, plus numeric values for the actual and theoretical FWHM's. This provides an objective and quantitative measure of a telescopes true performance, with less dependence on good seeing
  • Measures flexure/mirror flop using two telescopes, two web-cams, and two instances of MetaGuide that link to each other
  • Automatically re-centers the telescope during collimation so you can concentrate on the collimation adjustments and not have to re-center manually after each change
  • Acts as an autoguider with seeing effects partially removed from the error, so the "chasing of the seeing" is directly reduced
  • Locks onto a user-specified error frequency and corrects for it proactively, acting like a new level of periodic error correction that does not rely on indexing and can work at higher frequencies
  • Calculates centroid based on live view of stars using a very different algorithm than simple "center of gravity." To reach fainter stars, the frames may be stacked first for the effect of long exposures
  • Provides graphical output and logs of drift and periodic error in your mount, including the "noise" that can be hard to remove with PEC (Periodic Error Correction).

How does it work?

  • MetaGuide uses realtime image processing of the video stream to process each frame, find the star centroid, and output a realtime stacked version of the recent frames
  • Bad frames are automatically culled from the stack without user intervention
  • Normal autoguiding software assumes the guidestars are nice Gaussian shapes - but in fact they have broad and misshapen wings due to seeing. MG focuses on the central hot spot of the star in each video frame and guides on the centroids of these hot spots
  • MetaGuide is written in DirectShow/C++ for maximum performance since the amount of realtime computation is significant
  • The stacked view is magnified 4 times and aligned with sub-pixel resolution
  • This stacked view is also used as to determine guide corrections. Since this view has bad frames removed, the resulting error signal is a truer representation of the error due to the mount. This reduces the "chasing of the seeing."
  • The radial plot is calcluated based on the stacked image, allowing direct comparison to theory and calculation of FWHM

What are its requirements?

  • MetaGuide requires only a video camera and Windows computer with recent DirectX installed to perform the core diffraction analysis of a star.
  • Most cmos cameras are supported and Canon DSLR's with the Webcam utility. The user can specify any resolution the camera supports. The main requirement is that the camera has a DirectShow or WDM video driver
  • For the guiding features of MetaGuide, a connection to the mount is needed. The mount must be either equatorial or on a wedge, and it must support PulseGuide
  • A view of the diffraction pattern requires small pixels and benefits from a red or IR filter.
  • You don't need to resolve the Airy pattern and rings to collimate, but it does make it clearer. If you can't see the ring you can still use the coma dot as a guide.

Recent News

  • New Version 6.1.0 and new forum and website!

Download and Documentation

NEW! November 2021 Release version 6.1.0

  • Bug fixes to 6.0.7
  • Fix to 0's in guide logs
  • Now include MGSetup.exe for apps to control MG without code
  • Better handling of .mg setup files in Documents\MetaGuide directory
  • More debug info
  • Other performance enhancements and bug fixes

DISCLAIMER:This software is supplied as-is and without any guarantees or warranty. The author is not responsible for any damage or losses of any kind caused by the use or misuse of the software. The author is under no obligation to provide support, service, or corrections

MetaGuide 6.1.0 Installation, with extensive documentation and fixes for clean install on Windows (About 5MB)

Unzip the install file and run MGSetup.exe. A pdf of documentation and a text file of updates will be installed in the MetaGuide directory. You can access the help using the menu of F1 from within MetaGuide.

This is a new installer, so please save any old files you need in the MetaGuide directory, such as logs, images and .mg setup files.

Unfortunately some anti-virus tools may give a false warning of a virus because it is a new package provided by this new web site. You will likely get a warning when downloading it that the file is not a common download - but that warning is to be expected. If you get additional warnings that concern you, try pointing VirusTotal at the url of the install package and it should give a clean report based on many virus checkers.

MetaGuide documentation alone, in pdf format, for perusal without doing the install. Detailed instructions and many examples. This manual is included with the installation.

MetaGuide documentation in html format

Support

For support please read and join the forum at the main MetaGuide site

Guiding

Low latency guiding with video. Quick and accurate corrections for mid-range mounts.

Achieve tighter and rounder stars than with long guide exposures and standard centroid algorithms.

Let MG find and select faint guidestars as they come into view so you don't have to squint at the screen.

Collimation

Collimate using a star with the telescope aimed at the correct angle to the sky. Just center the coma dot on the star while the mount re-centers it. In better seeing you can use high power and collimate on the in-focus diffraction pattern.

Take an annotated and scaled image of your collimated star to show how well your star diffraction pattern matches theory.

Seeing measurement

Measure size of the star spot as it moves around over each 2-second interval, with live plots. Can be used as a dedicated seeing monitor with a telescope, or just to check seeing conditions

Drift alignment

Measure the dec. drift of the mount quickly so you can make rapid polar alignment adjustments to null out the drift.

Periodic error logging

Log periodic error in detailed formats for analysis in other tools. These measurements are taken every 0.5s with an accurate centroid, allowing high resolution studies of your mount behavior including gearbox and other noise. This may be the most important type of error for good guiding compared to the slower and more easily corrected terms.

GuideView mode

GuideView mode lets you watch the live guide corrections in video mode so you can see the small, fast motions of your mount that are the key to getting tight stars.