Guiding with a webcam

Hello guys,

can anyone suggest an easy and relatively inexpensive way to guide exposures using a webcam and appropriate software? I'm referring, more specifically, to the hardware part. The only solution I could come up with is to apply the webcam to a small refractor that would replace the finder and guide through that, but this would force to invest more than I would like for this experiment.

Thanks for any suggestion

Ciao
Luca

Your options are a dedicated guide scope or an off axis guider. I prefer the guide scope. The reasons are you can adjust the gscope till you find a decent star! Very important as my best efforts on a web cam are only around mag8-9 ( mostly because of my skies ) MaximDL has a driver for the web cam and can be used with the auto guide. I'm sure there are other packages that can do this as well ( I wish K3tools had this feature )

Be forwarned! the Focal lenght, mount vibration and angle off axis will all effect your guiding ability. But by far I found this the best way to go thus far.

Bill Russell