Unboxing/first light Orion 50mm Guide 'scope with QHY5

[celkins]

My first proper post

This last week, I received the Orion 50mm mini-Guide 'scope that I'd ordered from SCS-Astro; got to see it on Friday: a couple of weeks earlier, I'd received a QHY5, ordered from Modern Astronomy. An ST-4 style cable came from FLO, along with a serial lead for the mount's handset.

The QHY5 had been adequately, if cost-effectively, packed but at the price, no complaints: by contrast, the Orion guide scope was in a custom box, with all supporting components neatly in resealable bags, and carefully packed.

Spent about half an hour on Friday evening getting the guide scope focus approximately correct for the guide cam (using QGvideo), having previously installed the drivers and tested the cam could detect light/dark - too much cloud to be worth trying to do more tonight...

On Saturday, I mounted the saddle/mounting adapter onto one of the top-side mounting holes (using the provided screw) on the cradle of my Bresser Messier R152s , sitting atop a Celestron CG5-GT mount : after 5 minutes making sure the guide scope faced the right way (50/50 chance - like the Lottery, my luck's not good ) - everything looked good.

Come dark, I polar aligned the mount, carried out a 2-star align and added a couple of calibration stars: mounted the imaging camera, and the guiding system, then hooked them up to the laptop, and initially used the QGvideo application to see what the guide camera could see of the night sky - not much: after increasing the gain to 90% and the exposure to 2.5-3 seconds, a pretty little starfield appeared in the video window

So far, so good, so after slewing to M57 (and skipping details of focusing the imaging camera using my home made mask) , I fired up PHD Guiding (provided with the QHY5). After 2 simple steps of telling it that I was using a QHY5 via ASCOM, and that the mount was accessible via the camera, choosing the "focus" option showed a similarly clear starfield with several reasonably bright stars; choosing one of these, I told it to start guiding... after several minutes of calibration (fully automatic, with progress messages appearing at the bottom of the screen), the cross-hairs went green - great, I was auto-guiding!

I allowed PHD a little while to "settle in" to guiding the mount, keeping an eye on the tracking graph (which did show some deviation as the hysteresis function settled), whilst I fiddled with exposure duration on the imaging camera...

How effective was it - well, when previously taking 90-second exposures of M57, I had to ditch 50% of them due to star-trailing: this time, 100% of the lights were usable, with essentially round stars, or at worst a slightly elliptical image (probably due to me walking past the mount whilst it was exposing).

At 2am, the clouds rolled in (so much for the clear night forecast ) which also coincided with my 17Ah Maplin power pack running down - something was telling me it was time to retire to bed!

OK, so only a first session - but my initial impression is that the combination of Orion 50mm mini Guide Scope and QHY5 camera is a very effective setup at a reasonable cost.

[JohnnyD333]

I agree, I love my Orion 50mm and Starshoot guider. Works very well and is very light. I am using a CG5 as well and a light weight guidescope is very welcome.

[ollypenrice]

Good stuff. It may not be an issue but what troubles me about using the finder-guider bracket (it's the same bracket as the standard finder, no?) is the spring loaded device that works against the two adjuster screws. While I think this is a great idea for making a finder quickly adjustable it is the last thing I'd want for holding a guidescope. Here you want a seriously rigid fixation of the guidescope, not somethng spring loaded. If the cables snag on anything or shift then they are going to pull on the camera against the little spring and introduce flexure.

I think tying off the cables close to the guider bracket to prevent this would be a good idea.

But it's certainly a cute little setup.

Olly

[celkins]

Well, mine certainly doesn't have a spring-post, it has 3 thumb screws - the manual also makes reference to making sure that all 3 thumb screws are tight before you start guiding!

[JohnnyD333]

Olly,

The 50mm scope is built quite well. I have a few finderscopes and I understand the spring post being a weakness. They are inadequate for anything other than observing. The Orion scope is solid and does not move, it is held in place by the 3 screws mentioned. Although it is a small scope, it is in a different class than a basic finderscope.