Star Adventurer Guide Scope

[daveangie0110]

Hi All

I have a Skywatcher Star adventurer and i would like to try and auto guide it using my ZWOASI120 camera, i have been looking at the Orion 50mm Guidescope.

Has anyone been able to auto guide there Staradventurer yet if so what sort of exposure times was you able to do.

This will be the first time i have attempted to auto guide can anyone give me any links so i can read on how to do it.

Many thanks

[Thalestris24]

Hi

I've autoguided mine It only guides in RA though so your DEC PA needs to be good. You have to watch your weight and balance. I suppose exposures are limited by the rate of drift in DEC. If your PA is spot on and is stable, there shouldn't (in theory...) be an upper limit to exposure length. Here's an earlier thread of mine: http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/255203-star-adventure-first-light/ I've kindof abandoned it for the moment as I couldn't do what I wanted to do as the SA had trouble carrying the weight of a scope. I've reverted to a camera and lens but haven't done anything with it yet. Not helped by tripping over the usb power cable and ripping out the 5v usb socket... Tut! I hope it's repairable but haven't got around to looking at it...

Louise

[daveangie0110]

Thanks Louise, as I won't be putting any sort of scope on the SA just my DSLR and a 300mm lens is it worth trying to guide it or would I be wasting my money.

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[Thalestris24]

Thanks Louise, as I won't be putting any sort of scope on the SA just my DSLR and a 300mm lens is it worth trying to guide it or would I be wasting my money.

Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

Hi

It might be worth it at 300mm though you'd probably get decent results at shorter fl unguided. The trouble with the longer focal lengths on the SA is that it's not easy to find and point to targets plus it's not that easy to add a guide scope. It might be better to just use it without a guide scope and see what your max sub length is at a given focal length. If you can, pointing up high might be a good idea too, I think. If you do try guiding you have to tell PHD2 to switch DEC guide mode off. PHD2 doesn't seem to save it's calibration without DEC guiding so you have to calibrate each session.

Good luck!

Louise

[Howie_Oz]

Re hard to find objects with SA ... I shrunk an internet sourced Dobs setting circle image down using InkScape (free) so it fitted around the SA DEC part. When it's the right size, laminated it and hot glued to the SA DEC head.

For RA it was a simple matter of using the SA polar scope 12 month rotating "polaris" ring. Except you have to double the markings! The 12 month segments times 2 become 24 hour segments instead. The smaller marks on it normally denote 4 days but when doubled and used as RA each mark represents 8 minutes. 

Setup and PA using the normal methods. Once setup, go to a bright star and 'sync' on it ... IE make sure the 'RA' ring and DEC are reading the correct values for that star (I use SkySafari on iPhone). Then it's pretty easy to look up your targets RA and DEC on the app and manually use the setting circles to find it. 

Photos in this link....https://picasaweb.google.com/111579318383500355975/Astro201601

Cheers 

[Martin Meredith]

Thanks Howie for this great idea and photos. Coincidentally I'm just starting to use the same mount as the basis for a lightweight EAA travel scope, and currently doing some initial testing to see what kind of sub length I can get (thread in video astronomy forum). Finding targets at 480mm in my case is definitely an issue, although I intend to operate nearer 300mm eventually; I enjoy star hopping so I'm currently swapping an eyepiece in and out to find targets, but this is not ideal for EAA purposes and anyway only works for the brighter targets, so I'll definitely be adding setting circles. I'd be interested to know how you get on with yours for EAA.

Martin