The quick-start guide to the Palomar Autoguider.

To get started do the following:

1. Move the cursor to the fifth panel down from the top of the display (the one labeled FRAME GRABBER). If its ENABLE button is bright yellow, the camera is disabled, so move the cursor over the ENABLE button and depress it by clicking the left mouse button.

2. Within the same panel you should see a FRAMES PER INTEGRATION slider and an INTEGRATIONS TO AVERAGE slider. If the values to the left of the sliders aren't both 1, then change each of them to 1 as follows. First move the cursor over the black rectangle of the slider. Now, with the left mouse button held down, move the cursor left until the displayed value becomes unity. The black rectangle should now be at the left end of the slider. With these settings a new camera frame will be displayed every 30th of a second.

3. Now move the cursor to the third panel down from the top of the display (the one labeled GRAY-SCALE) and find the ADJUST button. If this button isn't already depressed, push it by clicking the left mouse button. It should turn bright green to indicate that the gray-scale adjustment function is now active. If it doesn't, click again.

4. Now move the cursor into the image-display window and click the left mouse button briefly, somewhere near the middle of the window. The image may now turn black or white, depending on where you clicked the button. You should change this to a dull grey color as follows. If the image is black, move the cursor right to increase its brightness. If it is white, move the cursor left to decrease its brightness. Now move the cursor up, to increase the contrast, or down to decrease it, until you can see unsaturated readout noise. When you are happy with the results, press the left mouse button again to adopt the new settings.

5. Skip this step if you are using the COSMIC guider camera. It doesn't have an adjustable image intensifier. The other supported guide cameras do.

   Move the cursor to the CAMERA SENSITIVITY panel and find the INTENSIFIER GAIN slider. Move the cursor over the black rectangle of the slider and slowly move the cursor to the right while holding down the left mouse button. Stop when features (eg. a star or saturated speckles) appear in the image.

6. To increase the signal to noise ratio of the image, you will probably need to average a number of 30th second frames. To do this, move the cursor to the FRAME GRABBER panel and again find the INTEGRATIONS TO AVERAGE slider. This time drag the black rectangle of the slider to the right, until the number displayed to its left is roughly 30. Then let go to adopt this value. The image will now update only once per second, but because it is the average of 30 frames, it should look much cleaner. To make it look even cleaner, further increase the slider value.

7. If a potential guide-star is evident in the image, you can now select it for autoguiding by moving the target box over it. To do this, move the cursor into the TARGET panel (the topmost panel), find the POSITION button and depress it by clicking the left mouse button over it. The POSITION button should now turn bright green to indicate that the target-positioning function is now active. Notice that the single line of text below the image window contains terse instructions on what to do next. First move the cursor into the image display window and briefly press the left mouse button. A target box should now appear next to the cursor. Move the cursor until the target box is approximately centered on the guide star, then press the left mouse button to adopt the new position.

8. Now move to the AUTOGUIDER panel and press its GUIDER button if it isn't already depressed. Then find the ENABLE button and depress it. If the star has sufficient signal to noise, the guider will now attempt to keep the guide star near the center of the target box by moving the telescope. Note that at most one telescope move will be performed every time that two successive camera images have been displayed. A hard limit of one correction per second is also enforced. If the star doesn't have sufficient contrast against the background, then the Autoguider won't attempt to guide. If this is the case, try adjusting the image contrast, the intensifier gain and/or the number of frames being averaged, to increase the contrast of the star.

9. If the guider doesn't appear to be doing a good job, this may mean that the camera orientation calibration isn't correct. The best way to test whether the calibration is ok is to use the cursor, as described below, to move the telescope, and then watch to see if it goes where you asked it to. If it doesn't, then you should use the automatic pixel calibration facility, as described in the main user manual.

10. The most convenient way to move an object within the image is to use the cursor to command the required telescope move. To do this, first press the GOTO button in the FIDUCIAL MARKER FUNCTIONS panel. It should turn bright green to indicate that the goto function is now active. Now move the cursor into the image window and click the left button over the destination position of the object. An arrow head should now appear there, and you should now move the other end of the arrow to the object to be moved. If you now click the left mouse button again, the object should move to the specified position. Note that (as with all other image-window functions) press the right mouse button instead of the left button to back out of what you started.