Building my telescope setup - Ebay all the way!

I started off with a 4 inch newtonian reflector on a manual equatorial mount. This was great fun at first. Finding and observing the moon and planets was both rewarding and frustrating. Rewarding in the detail you can see with even a modest scope when observing the moon, Jupiter and Saturn; frustrating in the realisation that everything is moving! How are you meant to take photo of something that's disappeared from the field of view even before you've had time to take the lens cap off and how on earth are you meant to get it in focus?? I had some success with snaps of the moon using a small digital camera but Jupiter was out of reach with this setup. Didn't take long to work out I needed to involve a computer and a motorised mount - but which one? 

After selling my  newtonian to a work colleague I managed to pick up a Skywatcher Alt-Az GOTO mount with 5 inch Maksukov Cassegrain telescope attached. My first punt on Ebay for such an item - but what a fantastic buy. This was a really compact but powerful scope allied to a mount that was rock steady and "found things", provided you could master the alignment routine. So, off to the back garden on the first clear night I went. 2 hrs later and much cursing I managed my first 2-star alignment!! Proud of my achievement, I searched through the objects listed on the handset database and went for my first deep sky object (DSO), the Andromeda galaxy.After much whirring of gears and sounding like a coffee grinder, the scope settled on my chosen target. With great anticipation I put my eye to the eyepiece and said to myself "Is that it??" Honestly, all that fuss and frozen fingers and all I can see is a large fuzzy blob? Where were the dust lanes? This thing was meant to have billions of stars in it? Feeling quite deflated I went for another DSO but this time it was a smaller, more faint fuzzy blob. Time to re-evaluate.

On reflection my anticipation and expectation was driven by the promise of the images adorning the box of my first scope. I can see why a first-time telescope buyer would be deeply disappointed in their purchase if their experience was the same as mine.....but to be honest, It just made me even more curious as to how amateur astrophotographers were achieving almost Hubble-type quality in their pictures. Further research was required so onto Youtube I went and wow, information overload! Where to start? Luckily I found Trevor Jones @ www.astrobackyard.com. And things started to click. More Ebay activity followed and, within the space of 3 months I had landed my first proper mount, a Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro and a bigger, more powerful Skywatcher 6 inch Mak - cos bigger is better, right?

Well, bigger is steadier - absolutely rock solid - which is great for taking pictures - but oh my, it is heavier. Much heavier. And it takes longer to set up and break down. I needed a more permanent solution.......

Location: Long Eaton, Nottingham, UK

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Short nights? Warm weather? Must be summer!

Image
My new logo - courtesy of graphic design genius Amy Platkiw Looking back on my list of blogs, the last update from Astroshed@Sawley was 28th April 2018. So.....did I just give up? Declare the nights too short and simply go to bed? Nope - I got busy!! I took an early holiday in May. A cruise along the Norwegian Fjords had been planned for a while....so I took the opportunity to dismantle my mount and telescope and send the mount into Rother Valley Optics for a full service, re-grease, new bearings and a belt mod. Given the waiting list and turn around time for this service was 3-4 weeks, heading into the summer seemed to be the right time to do this with light nights etc - so I went for it! And then went on holiday!  Even while I was away I managed to get some lunar images. Check this out! A fantastic moonrise over Nordfjord taken from the upper deck of Cunard's Queen Victoria. It was early, mind! I stood next to the galley night shift when I took this picture. They wer
Read more

Time to build the Astroshed

Image
Time to build the Astroshed I don’t know when exactly I knew I needed my Astroshed. Maybe it was borne out of necessity; realising I had more kit than I knew where to put; my old shed being on my to-do list to demolish or I just got fed up of carting everything into the back garden to set-up and breakdown every time there was a solid chance of a clear night. I think it was the fact that, even when I got set up, I couldn’t move easily around the garden without setting of my neighbours security lights. I can remember a particularly frustrating session where this happened, only to be quickly followed with more frustration when the clouds rolled in. There had to be a better way to do this…… Trawling the internet one evening I came across a blog written by an amateur astronomer who had written about the same issues but had done something about it. Further research revealed a plethora of Youtube videos and stories of people converting mundane outbuildings, pre-fab sheds or even buil
Read more

Shoot the Moon

Image
Shoot the Moon It's a common sight in the night sky..... too common for some astronomers who always crave dark skies for deep sky imaging. I get the frustration; especially when a full moon coincides with the first (and only) clear night for months. But I would challenge my astronomer colleagues we with this simple thought. How many of today's astronomers interest in the beauty of the night sky started with their first look at the moon through a pair of binoculars? Don't we owe something to the moon for getting us into this hobby in the first place? You have to work with it, avoid it if you must but if you can't, by all means pay it a visit with your telescopes and remind yourself where it all started. Just a thought. A thumbnail crescent moon  - my favourite profile For me, the best times to observe and image the moon are in the early waxing and late waning phases. There is nothing more evocative than an early morning thumbnail crescent moon, close to the hor
Read more