Guide scope

[Chubster]

I have a celestron 660 sitting in the shed collecting dust. Would I be able to use this as a guide scope (eventually) or is it not up to it ??

Cheers

Chub

[MartinB]

It might be ok for manual guiding Chub - high magnification quickly showing star drift. However it would be useless for autoguiding since it would be too difficult finding decent guide star for the chip

[Chubster]

Cheers Martin...It was autoguiding I was thinking off. So what would be good for this ?

[blinky]

You could donate it to Blinky's astro collection?

[MartinB]

A short focal length refractor. Light weight and wide field of view so easy to pick up a guide star. Most decent guide software guides at sub pixel accuracy so you can comfortably use a focal length of around 400 to guide your scope.

[Andrew*]

nah. Don't listen to him. What you need is something like a 4.5" reflector, around f8.8. Funnily enough, I'm selling one at the moment...

Andrew

[MartinB]

Well it would sit very nicely on a Super Polaris mount!