My little eureka moment?

[Vega]

This might be a little eureka moment for me, or I might just have my head in the clouds but..

I desperately want to improve my images of M31 and have suddenly thought I probably already have the necessary equipment to hand to do some auto guiding. Here's my thinking...

-Canon 400D / Sigma 70-300mm lens piggybacked on 10" tube rings via a tilting bracket(for imaging)

-250px / Unmodded Toucam (for guiding?)

I know the Toucam is unmodded, but I have no problems seeing modestly bright stars on screen with it when I drift align. I am using a seperate tilting bracket for the Canon, so I could simply point the 250px to a bright star for guiding regardless of where my imaging target is.

Is this do-able?

Matt

[themos]

You'll do it!

[Vega]

Brilliant :hello1:

Ok one more thing.. the dreaded cabling..

Now I could go the ASCOM drivers route and guide through the supplied cable and handset. But I've heard that the guide port route is preferred method.

I have no serial/parallel ports on my lappy so im not quite clear on how to cable it all up. I know that astronomiser supplies a parallel guiding interface and cable for st-4 guiding but I have no port on the laptop for this (and they only provide serial to usb converters).

Maybe this means ASCOM is the way to go :scratch:

Matt

[blinky]

Either way will work! There is a lot of debate of which guiding method is best but I find the Ascom pulse guiding works for me.

[Psychobilly]

There are several USB - ST4 guideport adaptors available.. I use the shoestring astronomy GPUSB which works fine with PHDGuide my fav free guiding ap....

There are cheaper ones available.

Billy...

[Vega]

Cheers guys, after much research and your help I've got my head around it. Still havent chosen between the two methods yet. The ST4 route is the more popular looking through the forum archives. I would only go for pulse guiding (handset) if I bought the EQMOD interface so that I can use the mount w/o handset.

For now I'm just gonna try settin her up with the equip I got (use handset as interface for pulse guiding). However, I have a sneaking feeling that I'll end up going ST4 in the long run.

Oh look... cloudy, windy forecast this week.. would never have guessed

Matt