Well, this evening - it being fine and no wind, I set up my BT200 F4 Neut with my new beaut ZWO OSC and prepared to have a go at Joopy.
In the daylight, I set up the guidescope crosshairs on a tree about 100 metres away and aligned the exact view with my Illuminated recticle 12mm EP in the eyepiece holder. I got them to pretty well align. Then I put the camera plus 2x Barlow into the holder, switched on the laptop Sharpcap and fiddled around until I got a good sharp picture on the screen , of the tree branches.
All seemed good. I knew focus would be a bit out when I actually hit Joop, but at least it should be in the ball park.
Well, dark came. I lined up Jupiter with the guidescope, switched on the tracking, then checked that Joop was in the centre of the cross hairs in the EP. It was pretty close. I took out the EP and put in my ZWO and switched on Sharpcap. Set screen to 640 x 420, gain to about 100, exposure to something like 0.1 sec, and nothing.....just blackness. I then tried to move that ROI box around to try to pick up Jupiter. No luck. Took out ZWO, put in EP, centred Joop again, took out EP, put in ZWO still nothing. Tried about a zillion more times. On one occasion when I was moving the scope with the flexi knob, I saw a white fuzzy thing flash by on the screen. Couldn't get it back. Tried more focussing, different gain, all hopeless.
After an hour I gave up as fingers were about to drop off with the cold.
HOW DO YOU EXPERTS FIND YOUR TARGETS? Do you all take an hour? I cant believe that go-to scopes are so accurate that you can just dial in the object and Bingo there it is... So How do you do it? Must be a better way.......