Dedicated guide scope for plate solving

[descott12]

Hello
I do alot of spectroscopy so my primary OTA can't be used for plate solving as it has a spectroscope/grating installed. So I was planning on piggybacking a small guide scope for plate solving only. I can't think of any reason why this wouldn't to work.
I was planning on using 50mm f3.2 or a 30 mm f4 scope with the ASI 120 MM Mini (3.75 um 1280x960). Would this work or am I missing something.
Thanks
Dave

[admin]

Hi,


It should work fine – these are both common configurations for people using the polar alignment feature and that is based on plate solving. Just make sure that work out your field-of-view and have the correct indices installed in your plate solving application. The shorter focal length will limit the accuracy slightly, but probably not to any significant degree. You can work out the pixel scale when you work out the field-of-view which will give you an idea of how accurate it might be.

Cheers, Robin

[descott12]

Thanks for the reply, Yes I was thinking maybe a slightly longer focal length might be a little better.