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Hi Andy
I don’t have an EQ3 so bear with me.
You say your EQ3 has dual axis motors – these are great for tracking the stars, planets and galaxies. Your EQ3 has two axes, the Right Ascension (RA) axis and the Declination (DEC) axis, each with a motor. To make your mount track accurately, you need to align the RA axis with the South Celestial Pole and this will then allow your RA motor to drive the RA axis to compensate for the Earth’s rotation.
Your RA motor should turn your RA axis (very slowly) once every 24 hours (approx) so that when you look at a star in the eyepiece, it will remain in the field of view (FOV).
Now auto guiding is something completely different. When you mount is tracking, it is just chugging along at a fixed rate to keep a star in the FOV of your eyepiece. But, your mount and gears are not perfect – they will have errors so that the star will move in the FOV; hopefully it will remain in the FOV but it will certainly drift.
Now, if you were to put a high powered eyepiece with illuminated cross hairs into the focuser and centre this star on the cross hairs, you could compensate for this random and unpredictable movement, by manually pressing the motor movement key to constantly bring the star back to the middle of the cross hairs whenever it drifts off, which it will do every few seconds.
This is essentially what an auto guider does, but automatically. A CCD chip in the auto guider watches the star and if it moves, it sends a signal to the motors to bring it back to a known position.
I strongly suspect that your EQ3 mount does not have auto guiding capability, which is only found in the more expensive mounts in the form of a special connector and electronics. So it would seem your mount can track, but not auto guide.
However, if you fit a digital camera on top of the telescope and make manual adjustments as described above, you will be able to take long exposure photos (if your camera allows this) usually up to 30 seconds. By taking several you can then stack them together and obtain some quite nice wide field photos.
Cheers
Dennis
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