Quote:
Originally Posted by peter_4059
Looks like you are making some good progress with the QHY9 Rob. You are managing to get some nice long subs - how is the guide scope attached?
Peter
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Umm - pretty basic - at least to your engineering sensibilities I suspect Peter! The rings had been drilled out and extra adjustment bolts added. I bought the refractor, "rings" and a cheap webcam 2nd hand on IIS late '08.
Refractor is a basic cheap Meade with a dodgey plastic focuser, although the autoguider is usually sitting in a flip mirror assembly with the USB lead coming through clips over the back of the Newt's mirror. Rings screwed straight down onto the Newt's rings with no mounting bar. Both scopes fit in the original box like this, and it save weight + keeps the guidescope centre of gravity a bit closer to the mount. Since upgrading to the Orion autoguider I almost never have to move the guidescope to find a guide star (or even use the flip mirror) but it earns its keep sometimes in very starless fields.
The interesting thing is that all behaves surprisingly well once it settles on an object. I probably don't have the weight capacity to do a proper guidescope assembly either I suspect (or the time/money currently
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Focus motor is proving very useful - did some fiddling and made a right angle bracket from some angle iron from Bunnings and used your brass? adaptor fitting. OTAs were still drying out in the living room, so snapped off some pics...