budget guiding - will this work?

[m37]

Until I can afford a proper guide cam to go with my shiny new HEQ5 (which has emptied my bank account) I had a moment of derring do and splashed out 99p on a reduced Tesco webcam. An old nosepiece from an aborted Toucam conversion fitted in nicely, had a spare T to female 1.25" adaptor from my filter wheel set and eventually found a T to T joining ring in the middle of my now retired Pentax T ring.

I fashioned all of this into a super cheap (99p) guide camera:

I have hooked it up to PHD and got an image!!! It's even vaguely in focus:

Now taking bets on how disappointingly inadequate this will be when I fire it up tonight (cloud permitting). Any takers? 

[knobby]

Looks interesting, hopefully it will be sensitive enough to pick up some stars... Good luck

[Bizibilder]

If you can get a star to show on PHD it should be OK.

[m37]

cloud. will report back!

[Concept]

Where there's a will there's a way.....As already said "If you can get a star", hope you do! (and no I'm not betting against you, because I thing it will work if....!)

[todd8137]

Great i had a old webcam from tesco it was a great lunar cam ,i left it up at snake pass one night,more reports to follow i hope

Pat

[bdc]

Based on my experiences guiding with unmodded webcams, I think you could get it to work with a fast guide scope but finding a star might end up being very difficult with the OAG. If you still have your Imaging Source camera you might have more luck because it can do up to 30 second exposures

[m37]

And the exciting news is... no. It didn't. Totally rubbish in low light. Spent 5 minutes tracking a star that turned out to be a hot pixel. Classic.

Took your advice bdc and hooked up the DMK to the off axis guider today. Had a play in daylight and the focus is pretty much spot on. Used a x0.6 focal reducer to give me more sky to look at when searching for guide stars. Could still be tricky though.

Just started raining so we'll have to wait for the results.

cheers