OAG A GO GO

[PhotoGav]

So, I waited in at home this morning to take delivery of a Celestron OAG from the lovely FLO... Duly arrived and looked very daunting in its smart box. The Cloud Gods have been ridiculously kind to me and I have been able to setup this evening and give it a trial run. I struggled to get the guide cam to focus for quite a while, but otherwise it was relatively simple to attach and use on my Celestron 8" EdgeHD. I have been struggling to successfully guide the Edge with a finder guider and had managed a best of 360s and that was with the reducer fitted. Well, pah to finder guiders at long focal lengths... I have just viewed, with great nervousness, the first sub at 600s........ Round stars, hurrahhhhhh! I am now trying a 1200s sub, just for the hell of it!!!

Sorry, nothing more than sheer joy to report, but I had to tell somebody! My wife, kids and dog are all fast asleep upstairs - not sure they would listen to me enthusiastically right now!!!

I had a quick look at the graph in PHD2.... Shocking - it looks like the Himalayas! But I don't care, I've got round stars in long subs at last!

[Tinker1947]

There is a manual on the Celestron site gives all the spacing required ect....load in and then go to the "SUPPORT" section...

http://www.celestron.com/astronomy/off-axis-guider.html

[PhotoGav]

Quick update - 1200s subs are absolutely perfect... Beautiful round stars. Oh this is happiness!

@Tinker1947 - yes, I have been reading through that again and again to get it all working and it is absolutely all working with perfect spacing and round stars...

Did I mention, I have round stars, even at 1200s. I know I can go longer than that too... It's just asking me to go to 1800s. But I'm not going to today. No, I'm off to bed!

Good night.

Oh joy, round stars........

[Tinker1947]

I'm glad your so happy...

[swag72]

Excellent news!! The guide graphs are really not worth looking at when you are using an OAG at a long focal length. I have just given up looking at mine and instead put the guide star in the middle of some crosshairs and watch that for a minute or so.

If you can do 1200s then anything else will be fine - Hell, go for an hour!!!

[Stephen]

Excellent news!! The guide graphs are really not worth looking at when you are using an OAG at a long focal length. I have just given up looking at mine and instead put the guide star in the middle of some crosshairs and watch that for a minute or so.

If you can do 1200s then anything else will be fine - Hell, go for an hour!!!

What she said

[PhotoGav]

Hell yeah, I might just do that... 3600s here we come...

Oh no, I can feel another purchase requirement coming on already..... At that length........ DSLR noise ....... Ouch. Now, how could I solve that little problem?!!!!

[r3i]

OAGs are a revelation for long FLs.  Once you've got over the initial hurdle of getting the two cameras in focus at the same time, you wonder how you ever did without one.  Yes a bumpy PHD graph seem to be part of the territory - I've tried a few tweaks such as a longer guide image time, reduced aggression and adjusted the RA & DEC output percentages in EQMOD.  They seem to smooth things out a little bit, but the jury is still out on whether it makes a massive difference to the end result.