Manual guiding is difficult

[Albireo380]

I was down at COAA (Portugal) in early June and had a few attempts to manually guide the big Newt they have.

This was a single 120sec exposure. I discovered that manual guiding is both tiring and difficult.

Why is it that the EP of the guidescope is always 12 inches off the floor and at a crazy angle? Each exposure was agony and I developed great respect for the "olden days" where mannually guided (non-digital) exposures lasted 20-30 minutes.

My image is not perfect - stars are a bit "blobby" - but at least you can see M101.

Hope you like it

Tom

[Ant]

I've tried manual guiding once and I vowed never again. You are correct that the EP is always in an uncomfortable position, the level on concentration required is extreme.

You manually guided for two minutes, hat of to you mate!

Yes M101 is clearly visible. :hello1:

Ant

[beamish]

:salute: :salute: :salute: :salute:

Well done Tom.

Karlo

[Sam]

The title of your post is a huge understatement. Very nice image though - I admire your concentration and perseverance.

[LostNSpace]

A great result Tom considering it is manually guided, and it being a 2min exposure to boot.....

Well done

Mark

[dogfish]

Good on you Tom. The idea of doing manual guiding makes me shudder.

Cheers, Martin

[steppenwolf]

Well done on trying it (successfully!) - I too have tried it and I can honestly say it was one of the most nerve-wracking and uncomfortable experiences I have ever volunteered for! As a variation of using the eyepiece, I fed the output from a webcam to my PC and overlaid a crosshair on the image of a star so that I could record a Periodic Error Correction (PEC) session but it was still nerve-wracking trying to keep the stupid star on the crosshair. I now autoguide but I often wonder if my laptop PC is getting stressed ...........