| Telescopes: | |
| WO ZS110 | This is my new baby. I got this for Christmas(2006) from my wonderful wife. She completely surprised me with this. Earlier I had been talking in how this would be the perfect scope for my mount. I like it because it has great optics and weighs less than ten pounds. With this and the AT-66 piggybacked my imaging rig will come in at about 20 pounds. This is the photographic max for the GM-8. So far this scope has proven to be a good performer. |
| AT-66 | I got this in September 2006 to be a light weight wide field imaging and a guide scope. It has proven to be good guide scope with my NexImage using Guidemaster. For imaging it has bad field curvature and really needs a flattener. I just (1/2007) picked up a WO flattener and haven't tried it yet. With a flatter field this will be a great little imaging scope. |
| Celestron Classic C8 | This is the scope that got me into astronomy many years ago. I've used it visually on and off and it's proven to be a good scope for that. As the light pollution in my area grew worse, I found the scope to sit idle longer and longer. DSLR imaging rekindled my love for astronomy and I tried to use this as an imaging rig but the mount proved to be too unstable. I plan to keep it around for visual use. I would have a hard time selling it. Maybe my kids can use it someday. |
| Mounts: | |
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Losmandy GM-8 |
I love this mount. It has really opened doors for me in astrophotography. The stability compared to my C8 mount is like night and day. On a real good night (seeing and no wind) I can get about 2.5 arc second peak guiding error. This translates to 1.2 arc second peak error. This is definitely good enough for my 770mm FL ZS110 scope. I went with the GM-8 over the G-11 becuase of weight. I didn't want the weight of the mount to hinder my ambition to use it. My back is not as good as it use to be and the lighter mount helps a lot. |
| Celestron Classic C8 | See description in telescopes above. |
| Cameras: | |
| Minolta 5D | This is the camera responsible for my astrophotography addiction. I purchased this to be the family camera since I already had a lot of Minolta accessories. After finding the Cloudy Night's DSLR forum I learned how to take astro photos with it. It performs good if the temperature is cool. For an example look at the M33 photo, noise is well controlled in this shot. It was about 47F that night. On warmer nights is performs miserably. It has alot of heat build up as the number and length of exposures increases. It also has alot of amp glow originating in the upper left corner. One thing it does have going for it is the fact its a CCD vs CMOS, so it doesn't suffer from fixed pattern noise. If you fixed the amp glow and cooled it this would be a great astro camera but, then you would probably better off with a dedicated astro CD after all this expense. |
| Canon 350D | I purchased this camera to help with the thermal noise problem and to eventually replace the IR filter to unable the camera to pickup the HA emissions from nebula. I haven't done the mod yet but, the camera does perform better stock as an astro camera than the Minolta. I haven't used it extensively yet(also not in the summer) but, it does seem to have lower noise overall than the Minolta. This will be my dedicated astro camera. |