So, after our abysmal failure on our last trip out I decided to do some serious research into why and what could be going wrong with this setup. It turned out that there was two main reasons, 1; We needed to guide using yet ANOTHER telescope and 2; The mount may not be suitable for astrophotography even thought it is advertised as such!
[showad block=2]
I hoped that problem 2 wasn’t a problem and went out and bought an Orion Starshoot autoguiding kit
Basically, this has a CCD camera on the back of it, and it locks onto a star and then sends tiny corrections to the mount to ensure that the mount always stayed exactly where you wanted to point it. By now my setup was getting scarily big!
As you can see it is starting to turn into quite a bit of kit! By this point I had sold the Meade as it wasn’t suitable for my needs and wasn’t possible to defork it onto an equatorial mount.