Off Axis Guider thoughts

[edward-fraini]

Currently I am trying to use a guide scope with a QHY5 planetary ccd. To achieve focus I have about 9 inches of travel behind the base of the 80mm Orion Shorty. Actually I ran out of back focus and I still am not quite there. This does not seem like a good set up to me, due to flexture. So I am strongly thinking about joining the crowd and going to off axis guiding. I would appreciate any advice as to what hardware seems to be working for you. Preferable I would like to have the connectivity be pretty simple from a hardware look. I currently have a male 72mm thread on the filter wheel connect to the Tak 106 back plane.

Ed F.

[john-haynes]

My recommendation is to make sure that your guide scope/camera has a fov equal to or smaller than that of your imaging scope/camera. I went a long time doing that backwards and not understanding why my pictures looked like junk. The problem was that the star would move several pixels in my imaging fov while not moving noticeably at all in my guiding fov. Once I corrected that, things started working MUCH better for me.