CMOS quickcam for PHD finder guider?

[szymon]

I have a couple of old CMOS quickcams lying around; a communicate and an STX. Has anyone tried using one of these as a guide cam for PHD? I don't want to image with it, just use as a guide camera on the finder scope...

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[szymon]

There's at least one person who has done an astro-mod on the messenger:

http://photos.astro.free.fr/astronomie/?p=40

Perhaps it's worth a try...

[Edit: whoops, in the first post I named my quickcams wrong -- the two I have a the Communicate STX and the Messenger.  Both quite old CMOS cameras.]

[AstroGZ]

For a while I used a Quickcam Messenger as a guider with an St102. It worked very well as long as a bright star was within its pretty narrow FOV, otherwise it really struggled. Maybe with a finder-guider you may not have this issue. It was fully compatible with PHD and I had absolutely no communication issues between the two.

[szymon]

For a while I used a Quickcam Messenger as a guider with an St102. It worked very well as long as a bright star was within its pretty narrow FOV, otherwise it really struggled. Maybe with a finder-guider you may not have this issue. It was fully compatible with PHD and I had absolutely no communication issues between the two.

That's awesome, many thanks!  Did you modify it at all other than to physically connect it to the scope?

[AstroGZ]

No it was not modified at all, just connected with an adaptor to the scope. It did need an extension tube in order to achieve focus with the scope, but with a finder-guider you may not have this issue.

[szymon]

Indeed, I played with it late last night, took off the lens and it achieves focus by simply offering it up to the finder with its lens removed. Now I just need to think of a sensible way of mounting it (if all else fails I'll just superglue it).

No stars last night so I couldn't really see anything in the sky except clouds! I wonder whether you used the default PHD settings? And also what mode did you use the camera in, 640x480 YUV? One of the RGBs?

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[AstroGZ]

Used it as a Windows WDM Style Webcam with 640x480 RGB24 resolution. Not sure about YUV, but it may work better! To begin with I used the default PHD settings, but gradually changed settings to improve guiding. PHD is one of those softwares that you have to play around with! 

[szymon]

You're wonderful, many thanks indeed.

[AstroGZ]

Glad to be of help!