to autoguide or not to autoguide, that is the question

[cjdawson]

I see that I'm late to this party.  But I'll chip in my 2p's worth anyway.

 

Firstly, your current kit.  Yes is limited, but I think there's still room to play around.   Try piggy backing the camera on the mount.  Using your clock drive, stick to wide field photography and you should be able to get 2 min subs without start trailing.  (the 2 min is a guess)

This will let you take photos and work on the stacking techniques.  Actually from the flickr link it looks good off of the bat.  So keep on going.

 

Next, new kit.

Big study mount - most defiantly yes.

Stick to a smaller scope. a 200mm scope will give your endless trials.  an 80mm however will be alot more forgiving.  It's better to have a lower F/Ratio f/5 tends to work better.  (I image at F/10 and it means that my night dissapears to getting a single set of images)

Autoguiding - pretty much a must have if you are taking exposures of more than a few seconds.

 

I'd spend my mount first on the mount, then on the auto-guider then on the scope.   Before getting the scope, I'd use the current scope on the new mount.    Just take your time and make sure to choose the right kit, things can get very expensive when mistakes are involved ;-)

[iapa]

+10 for mount.

Having identified that the 130 SLT mount was inadequate for imaging, I upgraded to the AVX..... however, I then upgraded to a 200PDS - bad mistake as I was back in the same position of overloading the mount; idiot!!

Next time I weighed all the current gear - 200PDS, rings, dovetails, DSLR and guide cameras, included cables, guide scope ... everything. Came to about 28lb. Near the imaging limit of the AVX, so, well past what many people say for imaging (c50-70% of payload).

Then selected a mount that has a maximum payload of about twice this figure (actually it's rated 50lb) as I figure I am not going to be going to a different OAT for many years.

Yes - some people image with 110-120% payload, I've not got the sort of patience to do all that balancing for a tear down rig