Celestron AVX Unguided

[bhavdhillon]

Just wondering what are the capabilities of AVX in terms of capturing long exposures unguided for both wide field and long FL telescopes (1600 mm).
Anyone with practical experience can help me with the realistic details.

[billdan]

From what I have read about the AVX worm and gear, it has a Periodic error of 17 arcsecs Peak to Peak spread across an 8 minute worm cycle.
That's an average of just over 2 arcsecs per minute.
You will want to keep the error down to 1 arcsec or less or else you will get star-trails.
So I think the max exposure time will be between 20 to 30 secs before the stars start drifting off.

Of course you will need a good polar alignment so the stars do not drift away in DEC.

Camera pixel size comes into play as well, a CCD with 6 micron pixels can tolerate star drift better than the 2-3 micron pixel sizes with CMOS cameras.