I am limited with my exposure time to about 60 seconds with my current setup. Since I’d love to find out how my 3 Objects of interest right now (Andromeda and Whirpool Galaxy as well as Iris Nebula) would look like with a longer exposure time I was searching for a Guidingcamera.
In a german Forum I found a friendly Person (look here) selling a QHY5-II Camera for 100€, so what I needed next was a guide scope. Since I wanted to keep the costs low I ordered a cheap (30€) one from China (eBay).
The Problem:
The decision to cut costs and buy far away… the guide scope will arrive in 1-2 weeks from now. But today we will have good weather, tomorrow I can sleep… So everything is optimal, to make myself familiar with auto-guiding, except the guide scope is not here… But wait! I still have my finderscope maybe I can convert it.
I found no adapter piece with a thread fitting the end of the finder scope. Also, it gets pretty cold I thought I should add some dew protection. So … let’s not talk about it… but it is more “sturdy” than it looks!
Since I have no experience with auto-guiding or PHD2 (guiding software I want to try) I look forward to what the night holds in store for me 🙂
Supplement
It was an interesting night. Full Moon, so not the best conditions for DSO photography but I wanted to try guiding. Yeah so:
- It was extremely difficult to focus on my setup, but I managed
- I familiarized my self with PHD2 and it somehow worked but it didn’t 🙂
- The Positive: I managed to set everything up! The Object (Iris Nebula) stayed in the center of the image for hours NICE! Without Guiding had to recenter every hour or so because then I would see the object moving out of the center.
- The Negative: Guiding jumps around a lot and I think I can see it in the pictures. PHD2 corrected like crazy. I tried to get the hang of the parameters,… but yeh I think I need another night or two. Also having a scope where the camera is not held by duck tape and hot glue will help I think!
