Camera Guiding

[Simon E]

I noticed looking through the gallery that a couple of the decent pictures are taken whilst guiding with a camera on a 300mm lens.

I currently own two cameras, ie cannon to take the photo via the telescope and the Nikon with a 300mm Zoom that I could potentially us as an autoguider.

Is this possible via my celestron mount? ie: I have an autoguide port on the mount and a usb connection on the camera. is this at all possible?

Could this be at least a temp solution, well until someone makes a tube mount for me to add a 80mm guidescope.

Celestron do make a camera mount for the c8, thought I could use this setup in the meantime.

Worth it or not?

Si

[The Thing]

Hi Simon,

I have just acquired a £10 200mm F3.5 M42 screw lens with the same thing in mind. I will screw my modded webcam on the back of the lens using an Astro Engineering webcam/tmount adaptor and a tmount to M42 ring. I guide my LX90 8" using Maxim or PHD with a serial connection to the Autostar. Hopefully the lens will be more successful than my Skywatcher 80AT on this forking mount.

I don't think you can guide with a DSLR, the images would be huge for the guiding software to analyse - although I think in Maxim you can set an area to use for guiding.

Duncan

[Ian]

Dunc, for that to work you need the camera to only send the area of interest to the computer. Unless MarkS has written new firmware for his camera that does it, your limit would be having to download the entire image from the camera and then discard most of it for guiding.

[MarkS]

I use a webcam with my 300mm lens for guiding.   

Maybe it's possible to use a DSLR with Liveview  - but I haven't heard of it being done and you don't want the extra weight on your mount.

Most modern folk use autofocus lenses on their DSLRs, so old manual telephoto lenses are very cheap on eBay.

Mark

[Ian]

and some are surprisingly high quality. It's one area where being soviet or east german doesn't *necessarily* mean it's rubbish.

Don't apply this thinking to cars though. You will get a wartburg or trabant.