The change started here.  After getting really annoyed with the SynGuider II, I decided to got from one extreme to the other.  After looking around, I decided to go for the most sensitive guide camera that I could get hold of.

After doing some research I decided to go for it and get a Starlight Xpress Superstar. The mono version of this is much much more sensitive than any other camera that I’d used up to this point.

As a test, I hooked this up to my SkyWatcher ST-80, pointed it up to a random part of the sky and took a 3 second exposure.  This is what I ended up with.

For fun, I then uploaded it to astrometry.net to see if it would platesolve… and it did!

Turns out the stars in the image, from an empty piece of sky, were Magnitude 8.   That’s much fainter than anything that I’d be able to guide on before.   This is without the mount tracking anything.     This is the start of a new chapter – auto guiding can actually work properly.   Don’t think I’ll have problems finding guide stars now.