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I am looking into the asiair pro guide scope kit and am curious if anyone can tell me about their experience with it? I am very curious about what size telescope it it can guide. I currently shoot with a zenithstar 73 but will upgrade eventually (maybe using the zs73 as a guide scope down the line). Thanks in advance for you insight! |
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Hi, I've bought that kit. Well not the Pro, I think that has RPI4 but last year's version which was very similar. Overall, it is good. The mini telescope - ASI 120mm combo is particularly good, I don't think there are many telescopes that are so small. I have guided 600 mm telescope without issues, it depends on your mount of course. Above that, I would say you need a bigger guiderscope. The ASIAIR is essentially an improved version of INDI/EKOS on Raspberry Pi, which can -indeed must- be driven exclusively via the phone app. I don't think anybody else provides a fully functional phone app. Stelarmate provides one but not all functionality is exposed. With ASIAIR, the phone app _is_ the full functionality. If you don't mind using a large tablet or mini laptop for VNC and if you don't mind spending some time to learn KStars and if you don't mind spending some time configuring things, then I find buying a Raspberry Pi and installing Ekos/KStars on it with a script like Astropi3 to be a superior option. Much cheaper too, and allows you to use other guiding equipment (120MM + 30/120 ZWO combo still is a good candidate to be bought separately). But if you want something that just works and can be operated from your phone, then get the ASIAIR kit. Cheers, D. |
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Schmaks: I have no experience with the mini guide system but I have the asiAIR Pro as the 2nd/backup system to my Eagle3 Pro. The asiAIR Pro works perfectly every time and, to me, is worth its price just for the plate solving. The wifi range is only about 20 feet max but the entire system is very user friendly and just works . I set the asiAIR Pro to a target, focus with the Pro focus app or a Bahtinov mask, in about 2 minutes sitting by my rig. Then I put my iPad in a heavy ziplock bag and go to bed. You are a bit locked into ZWO gear with it but it is compatible with a good number of mounts. Scott |
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I have the asiair pro, 120mm mini, orion 30mm guide scope, asi294mc pro, ioptron ieq30 pro and can tell you that despite the system being locked to the asiair pro, it is the most comprehensive and portable system I have ever experienced, it just works. I recently got into solar imaging with the Lunt LS50THA and using the asi120mm-s with asicap via a usb otg adapter it's another dream configuration. For even more portability, I use the same ASI cameras and ASIair pro with the ioptron Skyguider pro for nighttime astrophotography when I travel. Bottomline, despite the proprietary components of ASI/ZWO there is not a more affordable package delivering such a performance impact. Highly recommended system. |
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| Don't lock yourself into vendor specific SW. Try Stellarmate OS! |
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I second all of the praise of the asiair. i'm up and running and taking subs very quickly; the platesolving of the asiair is particularly useful. one-stop control for everything. very easy to go from guiding and exposing on one subject, stop guiding, slew to another target, platesolve, re-start guiding, and start exposing. i own the regular asiair and the new pro. the range on the V1 is extensive. i can run my system from my upstairs bedroom when the mount is outside, about 50 feet and through a couple walls. the new asiair pro's range is the exact opposite. more than 5 or so feet away and it's useless. i've read a few forum posts where folks are speculating that it's b/c of the metal housing of the asiair pro... |
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| To overcome the lack of range with the Pro I tested a Netgear Powerline adapter with a gigabit port as well as a Netgear extender with gigabit port and they both fly with plenty of bandwidth to run my entire setup without fail. |
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| I may open my Asiair Pro to see if I can mount an external antenna. That would eliminate the need for the other devices. If the unit has an SMC port on the board where the internal antenna connects its a piece of cake to mount a high gain antenna externally. |
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Rapcon, please keep us updated on the wifi antenna work. I would be very interested in learning how to set it up. Thanks Scott |
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The ZWO 30mm F/4 Mini Guide Scope that comes with that kit has a focal length of 120mm. The rule of thumb for guiding focal length to imaging focal length is to get as close as possible, but no less than 1/3 of the imaging focal length. If you follow that rule you wouldn't want to use the Mini Guide Scope on anything with a focal length longer than 360mm. Some people will say it works just fine on longer focal lengths, but I would not use it. At 120mm a star might seem to the guiding software as having little movement, but at 500mm, 1000mm, or more, that same star could actually have quite a bit of movement and cause "star eggs" in your images. If the software can't see it then it cannot prevent it. William Optics makes the UniGuide Guide Scope ($150 USD) which has a 200mm focal length, and Orion makes the CT80 refractor ($100 USD) which has a 400mm focal length. Once you get to the point where the 400mm focal length wouldn't be enough I would seriously start looking into using an Off-Axis Guider. I have the ASIAIR Pro and I absolutely love it. I also use Kstars/Ekos, and love it too, but the ASIAIR user experience is what the next generation of users will be looking for. Any application that doesn't move towards that type of UX will go the way of the Dodo. One caveat with the ASIAIR, if ZWO makes a product they most likely will not support other vendor equipment of the same type. They support some DSLR cameras, and that list seems to be growing, but they do not support any other astro camera vendor, like QHY or Altair. They also, at this time, do not support any other focuser besides their own EAF. So, if you have other equipment besides ZWO products you might want to look at something like Kstars/Ekos on their RPi device. Also, I totally agree with the need to have an external antenna port on the ASIAIR Pro. That would make a huge difference in WiFi signal strength. |
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I think the actual rule of thumb is guider *resolution* should be 1/3rd of the main imager. So you are not comparing just focal lengths but focal lengths divided by pixel pitches which is important because the OP is considering the kit, not just the guider scope. And effective focal length is further altered by reducers, flatteners and correctors (although not too much with the last two). The ASI 120mm mini has 2.9μm pixel pitch so if your main imager is e.g. 4μm you can actually go for an imaging focal length about 35% higher than the theoretical 360mm i.e. 500mm. At 623mm I use a ZWO ASI178 bin2 which has 4.8μm pixel pitch, so I am very close to the theoretical 594mm limit. That said, I actually can only get guiding to work reliably (extremely reliably for that matter, twenty minutes in a row) if I bin the 120mm. Halving resolution is in fact the recommendation at the Elks website! So I think high resolution is actually bad for guiding because it will tend to overcompensate for seeing and noise. And the rule of thumb probably needs to be revised, at least in an amateur situation in the visible spectrum where seeing is the dominant factor, big focal lengths *will* be limited by a reducer and you rarely go above five minutes or so because of the sky background? The WO Uniguide is 520g and longer than the little ZWO, I think this is quite a factor because total weight balancing (especially on DEC) and torque can have much greater impact on guiding quality than resolution. Perhaps not so much with a heavy duty mount. I wouldn't know. I have this to say about the ZWO 30/120 though (and this is why I revisited the topic incidentallt): its optics leave something to be desired. Stars move a lot when focusing and curvature is bad enough to make polar drift aligning very challenging unless your guide star is at the dead center. Spent an hour yesterday dealing with that issue. Maybe not much of an issue if you are not into polar drift aligning and maybe it applies to all f/4 single element uncorrected refractors but it is the one thing that bugs me with that scope and I had to say it  Cheers, Dimitris |
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| * EKOS, not Elks |
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Hi, I own the ZWO combo; ASIair Pro, 30F4 guidescope and 120MM Mini. I use it to guide... wait for it... my Canon 6D MkII with 200mm lens. OK, so I have been waiting 6months for an SW Esprit 100 which it will be a better match for. By and large, I am very happy with this kit. 30F4 guidescope and 1200MM Mini work well and reliability together and with the ASIAir Pro - as long as I remenber to plug the auto guider into the usb b socket in the ASIAir and not the usb c (where is corrupts the data from the 120MM Mini). My only gripe is that the auto guider is held in with only two screws 120deg apart - making the 120MM lie squint with respect to the finder - so I don't have perfect focus over the field. I am probably doing something wrong here. The ASIAir control of the autoguider is really good, alth ought I am not convinced I am seeing the full chip on the ASIAir display. I suspect I will have to buy a tablet, as I am doing all this from my iPhone More generally the ASIAir Pro is excellent, and I would never part with it. It has both improved and sped up my sessions tremendously. With my old eyes I was struggling to use a polar scope, but the ASIAir PA routine allows me to align to within 1arcmin in less than 5 mins with my EQ6R- Pro mount. The only thing is that I have to switch the connection to my mount off on the ASIAir Pro app and rotate the mount manually by the 60deg required. I wasn't able to get the ASIAir Pro to rotate the mount reliably by 60deg; sometimes it didn't rotate at all, sometime it wouldn't stop rotating. When it did rotate properly, it tend to lose contact with the camera - invalidating the PA. No biggie. The plate solve routine with the ASIAir is amazing - although it doesn't work for me if there is heavy vignetting/cloud/obstructions in the field. But, then again, why should it? My one issue with the ASIAIr Pro is that about 50% the goto action drives the Dec axis in wrong direction - as if it was on the other side of the meridian. I haven't ruled out operator error on my part yet - but I think I have ruled out most of the stupid things I could be doing. Again this is not a huge issue - I only have to move the telescope manually in one axis to get close to the right position which I can check with plate solve. I don't find the Focus terribly useful on the ASIAir - I prefer instead to use Live View on my Canon. The ASIAir Focus routine seems to be quite noisy, but then again I could just be picking the wrong stars. This all appears a bit critical of the ASIAir Pro. Its not meant to be, I couldn't now observe without it. It is just a little idiosyncratic at times. I haven't had too many network issues, the box is about 10m from a Google wifi point. Wow.... as I finish this the house has had a decent shake from an earthquake - probably from the fault just off Milford Sound. Brian |
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| About WiFi range, it is possible to solder external antenna outlets to the motherboard, however I selected to add a 4G router to my rig with large antennas and always internet connection almost everywhere. To the router I choose to run a light soft ethernet cable from the Pi4B placed on top of the scope to make most connections short. |
