I now believed with all this kit that I had a reasonable chance of taking good pictures of the Andromeda galaxy now! How wrong was I..

We went out, set everything up, focused and went to Andromeda. After turning on the guide camera and telling it to start guiding the computer would not stop beeping at us! It could not guide the scope! Many hours were spent that night and subsequent nights to try and get it to work but to no avail. All we got was blurs. However I did get a nice photo just using my camera on a tripod that night

After yet more research it turned out the problem was a multiude of things. The Orion starshoot was sending the required signals to the laptop which in turn was telling the mount to move in a specific direction to track the sky. However, the mount because it was a little unbalanced and due to the weight of the equipment just could not move smoothly enough to track the sky properly.

Next Chapter: A Takahashi EM-200 is bought!