New Setup - Side by Side mounting.

[ngc2403]

hey ant,

that should sort you out fine.

p.s i may call on you to fid out how you run the guiding for the HEQ5 pro not tried it yet but i feel there will be problem no matter how much planning i do

cheers

ally

[Ant]

By all means mate, but it'll be pulse guiding to start with.

But as soon as I have worked it all out, you can ask as many questions a you want.

Just trying to work out if I can get away with only a standard Toucam III or if I need to go SC1!

Ant

[beamish]

Nice job Ant, look fwd to hearing how you get on.

Karlo

[ngc2403]

pulse guiding?

as far as i know you need a parallel port or serial on your laptop or PC then form that you sent the signal or pulses to the mount these differ from mount to mount.

if you plan to use a usb then the opticstar box is needed. it's like the DSUSB for DSLR's but for guiding.

the box coverts the usb signal to pulses for you.

how ever the only setup that i have seen that guided was one that used no box but ran from the laptop through a serial port. ( it was PHD guiding and it was the Orion starshoot autoguider )

i don't think that you need a modded webcamera, however unmodded your choice of guide stars are small. the Orion autoguider through a 70mm guider was full of guider stars in m81/m82 area at 500mm focal length. i would say that you might only get ~6 magnitude stars with exposures of 0.5 seconds if you had 2 seconds than you are looking at ~8 magnitude stars but this will depend on the CCD sensitivity and the size of the apaeture of the scope.

just had a thought that you may of be asking the question to yourself and not at others????

anyway thats all theory i think i will go with the opinion that work i.e. buy an auto-guider rather than make one all abit to complex for me i think

ally

[Ant]

There's a thread on cloudy nights (which I was pointed to in my help thread), that shows that using PHP guiding and the standard Serial lead connected from the laptop serial port to the handset will allow me to guide with no extra expense.

The last part is particually important to me

I will of course try this out and make copious notes and pictures for other to duplicate if needed.

Ant

[ngc2403]

hey ant,

yeah the prices of the guiders are quite high if you think that an DSLR cost about £300 and the guider is just a cheap modded webcamera for £200 i think that some one is making a mint somewhere and it's not the maker of PHD!

that program is free i think along with lots of other guiding programs so i can assum that the mods are expense because the chips are not used for anything else though it sounds like a bit of a ripe off really.

let me know how that goes for you and i may be temped to do the same as it's easy for problems to get solved if you know that someone else has done it first

good luck

ally