Guidescope alignment

[Startrek]

How critical is it to have your guidescope aligned to your OTA when autoguiding ? ( in particular Newtonian OTA’s )

If it is important to do so , could you remove your ZWO camera and use an illuminated reticle eyepiece in your guidescope and carry out a normal visual alignment on a 1 to 2 magnitude star ?

Welcome any advice or comments

[glend]

Most guidescope are pretty wide field, and in my experience perfect alignment is not necessary. I have a Skywatcher Guidescope mount on my 10" Newt and it has a significant X&Y axis movement range. So, don't worry too much.
The background star field and the Earth's movement in relation to it, will appear identical for any star target in the same general direction.

[xelasnave]

Could you not get a display from your guide scope camera to line up your stars?
Alex

[Imme]

That’s how I do it Alex. Open guide cam in phd and Image cam in sharp cap.

Centre image cam on star then adjust guidescope to centre target....easy

[AstroBogan]

i always find doing that to be quite finicky using just stars to align both scopes.

I point my imaging scope toward something large like NGC 2070 where I would be able to pick the nebulosity up on both the main scope camera (asi 1600mm pro) and the guide camera (asi120mm-s) in the previews. as soon as I have that somewhat centered on both I feel I am good to go. i just hate messing around trying to centre a star on the guide scope to match the imaging scope as I feel i get the same results being CLOSE and not exact.

just my input :P

[RickS]

As suggested, you don't need it to be perfect but if the guide star angle (angle between guide star and centre of imaging field) is too large then it can cause field rotation.

Cheers,
Rick.