I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the Celestron OAG to work with the Tak Sky90. In the end, I cannot get it to work – I can’t get the guide camera to come to focus.
I am using the Starfish guide camera. It attaches to the nice helical focuser, but is too far out to come to focus. It needs to get closer by 10-20mm.
The main camera focuses fine. I have tried various adaptor spacings with no luck. I think without the helical focuser it might get there, but then of course I have no way to adjust focus.
I have subsequently played around with using the Edge11 as my guide camera. It looks like I can get the Edge to see out of the slit everywhere except small regions near the horizon at the North and South, so this may work fine.
Unfortunately, when I tried guiding for 30 minutes, I seem to be getting a small amount of drift. It looks like flexure somehow? I will have to play with tightening up everything in hopes of getting that to work.The guiding within Maxim looks fine – the graph is nice and steady. It looks like Maxim is guiding correctly, but flexure (or something) is causing the Tak to drift.
Another thought – if I use the Edge as the guider, maybe I can set up Maxim to focus the guider (Optec) independently of FocusMax focusing the imager (Sky90/EasyFocus). Would not be able to automatically focus in ACP (well, maybe with some coding) but at least maybe I could easily focus manually. It is awkward to load the Optec focuser into FocusMax, switch Maxim to the other camera, focus guider, switch everything back.