Telescope Reviews: Can you drive a Giro II or WO Alt-Az mount?

I had an idea about driving the various Alt-Az mounts such as the Giro II/III and WO Ez-Touch.

I'm sure somebody has thought about this and why it's a bad idea, so fire away

I have a Giro II mount and really like it, easy to setup, no polar alignment, no levelling, takes massive amounts of weight and zero problems.

I was thinking about astrophotography and how the Chief Financial Officer has decided, for some obscure reason (lack of money?) that I'm not allowed to buy anything else. I then wondered if the Giro II could be adapted to do photography.

So my logic was:

Make a wedge for the Giro II. Clearly it needs to be where I am, 56 and a bit North
You need to be able to lock the Alt axis on the Giro
You need to be able to drive the body of the Giro at an appropriate speed.
Use a webcam to take lots of frames and throw away the rubbish ones (all of them?)

Making a wedge is easy enough, locking the Alt axis is easy as well, driving the body of the Giro is a little more tricky, but belts and stepper motors come to mind. Though also a little friction wheel (skateboard?) might also do for testing the idea out.

I'm not trivialising the effort, and I need to polar align, etc etc, but a) will this work? and b) Has anybody done this before?

What am I missing? or is this one of those ideas that should be tried out?

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Thanks,

Rob

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