From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: September 11, 2005 8:30:57 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Excuse my ignorance...

Tim;

On 11-Sep-05, at 6:39 PM, Tim wrote:

Milton:

I know you said that you gave up trying to get Astro IIDC to work with controlling Celestron

mounts.

What mounts can you autoguide (if any) with a firewire camera run via Astro IIDC?

You first need to get a KeySpan High Speed USB to serial port adapter:

http://www.keyspan.com/products/usb/USA28x/

from www.keyspan.com) so that Astro IIDC can "talk" to the mount. I'd avoid cheaper generic models too.

I recently purchased a couple Takahashi mounts off Astromart, an EM-10 and a NJP. It'd be

nifty if I could guide them with a firewire camera (Flea, when it arrives)!

A mount that follows the Meade LX scope protocols over a serial port should work.

I tried guiding manually with the Aplux on a meade 2045 mounted piggyback on my C-8 on

the NJP a couple weeks ago, but that camera isn't sensitive enough to see anything but the

brightest stars.

I use a second hand 200 mm F/4 (i.e 50 mm aperture) telephoto and a 3x telextender (focal length 600 mm) with a Monochrome Unibrain camera in 2x2 binning mode and at exposure time of around 133 ms. I can usually guide on stars a bit more than 5th magnitude. Manually I can go down to about 7th magnitude and 1 second exposures, but that's pushing it and sometimes I lose track of what exactly I'm "tracking" as a star too.

I ordered a 80 mm aperture / 400 mm focal length guide scope from Apogee last week and that should give me much better signal to noise for guiding.

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com