Budget autoguiding - To the extreme

[samtheeagle]

Right, having got the fabulous book "Making Every Photon Count" I've brought up my plans to try auto guiding... I had planned to leave this a while until I had upgraded my kit, particularly the mount, but Steve reckons that once you start auto guiding you'll wish you'd done it sooner

The thing is, until I can upgrade my mount to something considerably more substantial, I don't think I can strap on a second scope to act as a guide. It'll just be too much for the poor thing.

So the first question is what's the absolute smallest guide scope you think I could use? I have the crazy idea that I could maybe use a 9x50 finder scope. I know it's not going to grab much light, but with an SC1 modified webcam I can give it good long exps to form the image. Maybe? Am I fooling myself here?

Then I can grab a simple parallel ST4 interface, mod my controller handset and I'm away... All at a very modest cost.

Anyone else been crazy enough to try out this kind of thing? Or am I blazing a trail here? Obviously I know that this set up, if it even works, would be less than optimal, but this is a first rung on the ladder for me...

Thoughts?

[beamish]

Cough !!

see here,

http://stargazerslounge.com/diy-astronomer/79000-lathe-anyone.html

works an absolute treat !

Karlo

[samtheeagle]

Oooooo! Karlo, you are a God! So I'm not on a foolish wild goose chase! :S

w00tage!!!!

[beamish]

I don't think I'd go quite that far but your not on a goose-chase !

[roundycat]

I believe Chris Peterson uses a finder scope for guiding his LX200, no problems there. If I could figure a way I'd do it immediately.

Dennis

[samtheeagle]

Well my plans are coming together nicely atm, so when I've got a working set up I'm more than happy to put everything I've learned and coded into the public domain. I've got lots of help from others, so it's nice to be able to give something back

Just need a nice cheap second hand 50mm Antares finder scope... C'mon, somebody must have one!

[samtheeagle]

Well this weekend just gone I managed to complete the autoguider hardware and test it all out... It totally works! :D

More details can be found here: http://stargazerslounge.com/imaging-deep-sky/80835-night-firsts-d.html#post1228501

I intend to do a write up on how I constructed the device, and also make all of the driver code freely available, should anyone else fancy having a crack at a homebrew guider

[blinky]

sounds an interesting project, keep us all posted.

[astromerlin]

Hi, Looking good, I'm doing something similar with a SW finder scope and a toucam pro webcam. We seem to be similarly on the same path, I use a SW 250p OTA on a recently modded Eq6 mount. Once I'm up and running I'll post a writeup to SGL also.

Glad I'm not the only mad experimenter then.

Cheers

John

[samtheeagle]

Nah, there seems to be a good supply of nut bars hanging out around here