These plots shows the history of the guiding and focusing frame rate in milliseconds.

By default, the number of iterations displayed in the graph is 50.

By default the scale of the Y axis is automatically adjusted to fit the values displayed in the plots but sometimes to ease the reading it could be good to use a fixed scale.


The vertical toolbar allows to define how the Y axis will be displayed:

The check box allows to fix use the value displayed under Y axis label as a fixed scale.

To change the Y axis scale you must use the slider bellow the Y axis label.

There is one Y axis toolbar per plot, both plots can be adjusted differently.

The upper plot shows the guiding frame rates

The black curve correspond to the frame rate of the acquisition loop only (exposing,downloading, and pre-processing).

The green curve correspond to the frame rate of all related computations (exposing, downloading, pre-processing, and auto-guiding close loop calculations).

The blue-curve is the average guiding frame rate.

To change the guiding plot history length, see advanced settings.


 It is normal and expected that the frame rate leads to longer times than the guider exposure time set.

The difference is coming from the frame download (USB) and SkyGuard frame pre-processing.

Since Windows is a multi-task OS those values may fluctuate from time to time, depending of what the OS is doing.

However excessive long values, relative to the normal operation, may be related to some USB link problems and failures, which may eventually leads to SkysGuide time out and a guider re-connection tentative by SKG (see the event log file for more information).

SkyGuard will try as much as possible, after an unexpected USB failure, to reconnect the guider however in some cases it may not be possible to fix the problem without rebooting the application.

If such problem arise we recommend to inspect your USB links, HUB and settings of the camera drivers. For instance you may want to consider a lower USB traffic value (<100%) for the camera driver setting  since they may have to share the same USB cable.

When two large frames may be downloaded in the same time the US bandwidth (especially with an USB hub) may not be large enough, therefore setting the traffic bandwidth of both cameras to, or below, 50% should be consider in the eventually a two frame traffic collision .


To record the history into a file that can be later on used for analysis, SKG allows to write all Information into a Comma Separated File. Output to CSV can be enabled/disabled while guiding at any time.

 Plots are cleared when guiding is started. You can manually clear the plots with the  button.


 The lower plot shows the focusing frame rates

The black curve correspond to the frame rate of the acquisition loop only (exposing,downloading, and pre-processing).

The red curve correspond to the frame rate of all related computations (exposing, downloading, pre-processing, and auto-focusing stack and loop calculations).

The blue-curve is the average focusing frame rate.

To change the focusing plot history length, see advanced settings.

 Plots are cleared when focusing is started. You can manually clear the plots with the  button.