Hi All,

I've just taken my first pictures using my new off-axis guider attached
to my 8" LX-200 and have a couple of question about the procedure for
finding and focusing a guide star.

Tonight I had to give up trying to photograph any particular object
since I could not find a guide star in the vicinity of any I tried. In
the end I took a couple of shots of a random piece of sky where I
managed to get a bright star in the reticle, with the objective of just
proving my alignment/guiding could produce round and not smeared stars.

It must be said that I am just experimenting with my new equipment in my
back yard which is not particularly dark, but it was a very clear night
in Alabama and there were plenty of stars visible to the naked eye. But
whatever I did when I had the LX200 pointing at any of the 'Super' or
Excellent' objects that were above the horizon I could not locate a
suitably bright guide star in the reticle. All the procedures I've read
on the net seem to skip over this by saying 'center a guide star in the
reticle eyepiece', anybody got any tips,advice or web-page addresses
that may help.

The second question, concerns a problem I had, and eventually solved,
focusing the reticle eyepiece barlow combination in the off-axis guider.
Originally I had the whole barlow assembly in the off-axis guider and
the 9mm reticle in the barlow, but it was clear that I could not focus
the image by moving the assembly in or out of the off-axis guider since
it need to go further into the off-axis guider than was possible. In the
end I solved this by taking the tube of the end of the reticle eyepiece
and replacing it with the lens and tube from the barlow. Is this normal
or did I miss something.

Many thanks in advance.

Bob Stafford

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