Spent last night experimenting with Guide dog , the scope guiding software . Until i get a better suited guidescope i used my 120mm f/5 refractor on top of the SCT , the weight of the refractor tube is 8 pounds , the total of counterweight on the 2d system is 7 pounds so to balance everything i had to use my old meade counterweight rail system in tandem . All up i think i had maybe around 18 pounds , but everything was well balanced even though it looked ridiculously overbearing .
I really wanted to get a few shots off before the moon dominated the evening with the refractor , managed to get two shots of Eta Carina and Omega centuri using the D70 and the 600mm focal lenght of the Skywatcher ........
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...synta-web2.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1.../synta-web.jpg
Surprising everything went well with the payload on the LX , things where cut short with the cameras battery requiring recharging. Changing tack started to experiment with Guidedog , had the scope already hooked up to the laptop and being controlled via Cartes du ceil . Got spica lined up and went through the manual that i downloaded from the guidedog download site . Had everything running and things seemed to be functioning , guide dog was controlling the guiding .After some time the D70 battery was ready and decided to try some 5 min exposures to test the guiding . Had trouble getting fainter stars on the guidedog view screen and the end result i still have some work on PEC training and sorting out the settings with Guidedog but first night it was a good experiance .If anybody has any tips etc to offer that would be grand.
Cheers
