Equipment
Light, the photons, from stars that are burning through their fuel, dying in violent supernovas, and reborn in beutifull nebulas. The light is traveling years, millions of years, until reaching YOU. Reaching the back of your retina and forming an image.
How humbling that may be, the human eye has a pathetic aperture. And the gain of the rods at the retina is slowly adjusted and easily saturated by stray light.
The telescope has been the light bucket for the craving observer for a couple of hundred years, and they keep getting better. There are a variety of technologies to chose from depending on what’s required.
One of the key pieces for an astronomical system to work is the mount.
There are different criteria’s depending on it uses, but stability is key.
A Go-Go mount will provide the user with a computerised database to find his/her way to thousands of objects by the push of a button.
An Alt-Az mount is simple to use and understand. It's usually a good entry level mount.
An Equatorial mount is slightly more advanced but makes tracking the objects for extended time simpler and better for astrophotography.
To replace our home-grown sensor with another, more sensitive, easier to control, and that allow you to save images is very rewarding. There are different cameras for Deep Sky Objects, such as nebulas and galaxies, Planetary imagining, meteor and all-sky viewing.
I started my journey with a simple star-tracker on a tripod and a DSLR.
A small star-tracker is indeed a very nice little piece of kit, specially for wide field imaging. For thing such as milky way photography this is pretty much all you need.
But I had been craving a telescope since I was tall enough to reach the eye piece. But never got one...
Soon a 80mm refractor from Skywatcher was added. The Equinox 80 ED. A very nice APO refractor through which the Orion nebula and Andromeda galaxy was imaged in very good framing.
At first the Equinox was mounted with a Nikon D7000 on the Star-Adventurer.
It worked for a while as long as no more than a minute or two of exposure was expected.
Star hopping might seem like a romantic way to navigate the sky, and one do get to learn the stars. But really?
- No, Go-To is the way to go. A smaller, pretty much just an upgrade of the star-adventurer is the EQM-35 from Skywatcher. An equatorial go-to mount with an polar scope and 10kg load capacity. And very portable.
Now I also got into guided imagining where I used PHD2 on my trusty MacBook pro. A smaller guide scope with a smaller camera was attached on the main tube. This has the same centered stars as the main telescope. A so called ST-4 cable from the guide camera to the mount allowed made the computer to send commands to control the mount.
The dream was a schmidt-cassegrain telescope. A boy can dream...
Good with modest dreams is that they can became real!
This happened on a black Friday in shape of a Celestron EdgeHD 800.