Humayun, If you can keep your exposures very short, you may get away without guiding, however if you want to take exposures of any length you will need in addition to a dovetail mounting system you will need an equatorial wedge, APM, Parallel port guiding adapter (shoestring make a suitable adapter), a guide camera (Toucam or LPI) and some guiding software (Guidedog or similar) to do accurate photography. The real estate on the top of the OTA is adequate as you can guide through the OTA when the camera is piggybacked. Add to that a counterweight system to take the strain off the LX's gears (Bintel have a budget one at $129). If you check Pete's astronomy site in
http://www.users.bigpond.com/lansma/ , you'll get the idea. By the time you have collected all this stuff you'll start to appreciate why people go for equatorial mounts.
