Frank Freestar8n MetaGuide

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 or other control of the mount must be provided (GPUSB, TOGA, AstroGene, LPT, and more).