Since this thread has been dancing around the SBIG/SoftwareBisque/Guide pros & cons I've a question for the group.

My asteroid astrometry hardware consist of a 14" Meade LX200GPS coupled with SBIG's ST-8XME camera and AO-8 adaptive optics. Software consists of Dimension 4 for timing, CCDSoft for camera control, The Sky 6 Pro for feeding the object's coordinates to CCDSoft, Guide 8 for selecting targets/framing targets/obtaining necessary data, and Astrometrica for the actual astrometry.

Software Bisque has integrated CCDSoft with The Sky. RA and DEC are fed to the autoguiding routines so that only one calibration is required per night. And RA and DEC are fed to the image files so that there's no need to keyboard the info in evey time Astrometrica processes an image. This Bisque integration is a huge time saver.

However..... The Sky is awkward to use for asteroid work and tends to be complex to to its attempt to be everything for everyone. And I wind up reading asteroid coordinated off of the Guide 8 monitor info and manually inputting it into the telescope hand control for my go-to. It would be really neat to frame my asteroid in Guide and do a go-to using Guide's ASCOM capability.

I'm a bit timid about trying this while The Sky 6 also has control of the scope. Does anyone have any idea as to what would happen if I attempted to run the two ASCOM interfaces thru the same port at the same time???????????

Pete Peterson
Wishing Star Observatory I15