Anthony's Astrophotography

Posts Tagged ‘Astrophotography’

As per my review of the EQ6 Pier from AstroShop I have been selling some of my equipment to start stepping up in the capabilities of the equipment I use, this included my Orion Awesome Auto Guider kit and GStar EX mono camera. I was simply carrying too much load on my mount and was also having issues balancing my set up with three scopes attached.

In replacement of the Orion Awesome Auto Guider and GStar was the Starlight Express LodeStar Guider. This camera is very similar to the GStar in sensitivity but a lot smaller and is compatible with many guiding software platforms such as PHD. This allowed me to remove one of the scopes from my mount and lighten the load a little.

It came packaged very well in a blue plastic case holding the Driver/Software CD, USB Cables, ST4 Cable and naturally the camera. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I started to think about ways I could simplify my set up and make imaging from suburbia a little more successful. There are a few parts to this equation but the main issue was the set up time for all of my gear, this generally takes about 1.5 hours to set up the mount and tripod and fit/balance all the scopes and then hook up the computer and cables to run it all and then the time to drift align etc to make sure I am pointing to true south. By that time I need to start thinking about bed and really don’t achieve anything for my efforts.

This had to change if I was ever going to be able to get all my gear out and running during the week on a regular basis, so I started to think about what I needed and how I would get it. As a result I have sold off some of my gear like the GStar EX camera, the Orion Awesome Auto Guider Package, as well as my MAK127 Scope and Goto Mount, I will miss these things as I really enjoyed using them but had to raise the funds for my new ideas (on wards and upwards).

So what did I buy, well I still needed an auto guiding function so I purchased a Lodestar Guider Camera to replace the GStar and Orion Guider into one unit (this took some weight off my mount and made balancing far easier with just two scopes), but more importantly I purchased a Pier for my EQ6 mount.

Read the rest of this entry »