Guiding is an important part of astroimaging, ranking highly in my Top 10 Upgrades. It enhances your mount’s tracking ability, allowing you to follow objects in the night sky with a high degree of accuracy. It also unlocks the process of dithering, which is arguably essential for astrophotography. You can get guiding with a guidescope and guidecam. Regarding the former, I’ve been using a William Optics 32mm Slide-base Uniguide Scope for almost a year, and have found it to be excellent. Perhaps best of all, it’s only £99.
First off, the vital statistics. It has a lens diameter of 32mm, an aperture of f3.75, and a focal length of 120mm. Its overall weight is just 240g. I like small and light accessories, so we’re off to a good start! From the specifications alone we can see that it’s well-suited to wide-field astrophotography and portable set-ups. It’s even available in a few different colours; I bought a red version, which matches well with the livery of my Askar FRA400 astrograph and ZWO-branded accessories.
A guidescope such as this needs a guidecam to function. Fortunately, attaching one quite easy. An M42 thread is provided, and if your guidecam has a cylindrical 1.25” connection then just pop it in the back and tighten the three metal thumbscrews. Some adjustment may be needed to get the correct backfocus (20.1mm), but this doesn’t take too long. I use my William Optics 32mm Slide-base Uniguide Scope with a ZWO ASI 120MM Mini (review here), which is a perfect match.
Focussing is achieved by twisting the dew shield until an image is sharp, and then tightening a locking ring. It’s a fairly simple operation, and the locking ring mechanism means that focus will be held with no slippage. I focussed my William Optics 32mm Slide-base Uniguide Scope almost a year ago, and have never needed to adjust it.
Image quality is a-ok, with sharp stars across the image. The wide field of view is useful for finding a multiple guide stars, a boon given that my ASIAIR Plus now uses multi-star guiding as standard.
The “slide-base” mentioned in the name is a built-in Vixen-style base. This is designed for attaching to the saddle handle bar used with many Williams Optics telescopes, but importantly for me it’s also compatible with traditional finderscope brackets too. The slide-base provides a rock-solid foundation for the guidescope, and also allows it to be mounted close to a telescope’s optical tube assembly. This reduces flex and makes balancing an imaging rig a little easier.
ZWO offer a version that’s £10 cheaper, but that’s not much difference so I’d plump for the William Optics version. If you’ve got a long focal length imaging system then this guidescope probably won’t cut it, and you may want to go down the route of an off-axis guider instead.
In summary: if you have a wide-field or portable imaging rig and need a guidescope, the William Optics 32mm Slide-base Uniguide Scope will do you proud.
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