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Auto Guiding

Started by darryls, 03/30/2007 06:15PM
Posted 03/30/2007 06:15PM Opening Post
Hi

I have been enjoying this hobby for about 1yr now. Everything is still new and exciting. I have seen some advertisements about Auto Guiding. The thing is, advertisers or sellers don't really explain how this works. Can someone tell me in simple terms what this is and how it works, or point me to a website or book?

Thanks!

Darryl
Posted 03/30/2007 08:57PM #1
Hello:

Autoguiding is a technique used for long exposure astrophotography to keep the telescope accurately pointed at a target during the exposure. The mechanical precision of the telescope's drive and its polar alignment are never good enough to keep the image of a star on the same spot on the focal plane for many minutes. Thus, guiding is needed. Typically, a guidescope is mounted with the main telescope and is pointed at a nearby star and had a crosshair eyepiece. In the OLD days, a real person would sit at the guidescope eyepiece with the hand controller and make small corrections to the telescope mount to keep the star accurately centered on the crosshair. As you can imagine, doing this all night is boring and painful. So, an autoguider replaces the person with a small CCD camera. The camera takes an exposure every second or so and measures the position of a star on the CCD chip, and sends corrections to the mount to keep the star at that spot. Now the astronomer is free to do other things, like warm up in the car and fall asleep.

Cheers
Mike Connelley