Interesting Autoguiding Application

I came across this on one of the yahoo groups i subscribe to. It's called 'Metaguide'. It's an autoguiding application with a difference. What it seems to do is stack a few frames together before deciding on a guiding correction. It removes bad frames a-la registax so the correction image is clean and seeing distortions are minimised. This (in theory) should result in much better guiding correction because the guider is not 'chasing the seeing'.

I haven;t tried this yet so I can't say if its any good. The bad news (or good news depending on your POV) is that it currently only supports unmodified webcams. I can see why this needs to be the case since it uses a video stream. Long exposures would defeat the whole purpose of this application to a degree.

Anyway here's the link;

www.astrogeeks.com/Bliss/MetaGuide/index.html

It does look like this is not for the faint hearted. If your new to autoguiding I would strongly recommend you begin with PHD guiding. It ain't called 'Push Here Dummy" for nothing.