Handbook for
camera, or with a separate guide telescope, rigidly mounted alongside your imaging telescope. I personally use it with an 80mm aperture F5, inexpensive refractor as a guide ‘scope, but a shorter focal length lens will make more guide stars available in any given region of sky (See the picture below).
To use the autoguider, first orient it so that the connector plug is roughly parallel to the declination axis of your mount. This is not absolutely essential, as the training routine will learn the angle of the head and compensate for it, but it is easier to understand the motion of the guide star if the guider frame is aligned with the RA and Dec axes. Now connect the head to the SXV camera, using the 18 way connector lead, including the port divider box, if it is to be used.
The recommended way of connecting the autoguider output to the mount is to use an RJ11 telephone lead between the socket on the SXV camera and the autoguider input of your mount. This output is ‘active low’ (i.e. th e control relays pull the guider inputs down to zero volts when applying a guide correction) and matches most of the autoguider inputs on commercial mounts. If ‘active high’ inputs are needed, or a very low control voltage drop is essential, then you will need to add a Starlight Xpress ‘relay box’ between the guider output and the input to the mount. Please contact your local distributor if a relay box is required. Some mounts (Vixen, for example) use a similar guider input socket, but have
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