My Astronomy

 

 

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My Telescopes

My Main Telescope - C14 and Paramount ME

My new Paramount MyT and 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien Telescope

MyT Hand Controller

My Meade 12 inch SCT on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

My 4 inch Meade Refractor with Sky Watcher Guidescope and ZWO camera on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

Skywatcher Star Adventurer Mount with Canon 40D

 

My Solar setup using a DSLR and Mylar Filter on my ETX90

DSLR attached to ETX90. LiveView image of 2015 partial eclipse on Canon 40D

Astronomy Blog Index
About the Site

 I try to log my observing and related activities in a regular blog - sometimes there will be a delay but I usually catch up. An index of all my blogs is on the main menu at the top of the page with daily, weekly or monthly views. My Twitter feed is below. I am also interested in photograping wildlife when I can and there is a menu option above to look at some of my images. I try to keep the news feeds from relevant astronomical sources up to date and you will need to scroll down to find these.

The Celestron 14 is mounted on a Paramount ME that I have been using for about 10 years now - you can see that it is mounted on a tripod so is a portable set up. I still manage to transport it on my own and set it all up even though I have just turned 70! It will run for hours centering galaxies in the 12 minute field even when tripod mounted.

 

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Sunday
Mar092014

Day 26 Telescope 2 Setup and the Telrad

I decided to utilise the SBIG ST9XE on the 4" refractor as it was not a combination I had tried before. The setup is now like this.

The camera was attached with the 0.8X focal reducer in place so there should be a fairly wide field of view.

I managed to reduce down to a single USB cable as I had managed to get the USB hub working as normal. There are four devices now controlled through the single USB cable - the CGEM, the Canon 40D, the SBIG camera and the filter wheel. I could also have added the electronic focuser but did not have an adaptor to attach the focuser to the 2" telescope fitting. So I am using CCDSoft to control the camera and the filter wheel, APT - Astrophotography Tool to control the Canon 40D and NexRemote to control the telescope or the Sky6 if appropriate. I used the Sky6 in the past to slew the CGEM through a list of galaxies which were imaged automatically.(When I had a 12" Meade on the CGEM a couple of years ago).

The Telrad proves extremely useful - this is what it looks like

This is a view of the Moon sighting through the Telrad

 

 The Telrad is structured as shown below.