OT - I went horse hunting last night

[Phil O'Keefe]

Then I'd advise you to find a better image to "borrow" - mine is okay, but there are much, much nicer ones out there.

[Phil O'Keefe]

 

Gets ya out of the studio doesn't it.

 

It does, but it actually doesn't really have to. I could run a powered USB line from inside to the telescope for the camera feed, and then everything else can be done remotely. In fact, I could add a wireless USB transmitter for the camera feed, and then it could all be controlled sans wires. I already use an iPad app for locating targets and controlling the telescopes, and it communicates with the scopes over wifi - just tap on what you want to see and the telescope slews right to it.

[Phil O'Keefe]

What equipment are you using... those images are fantastic.

 

Thanks.

 

I have two telescopes - a Celestron SLT 102, which is a 4" achromatic refractor mounted on a motorized "goto" alt-azimuth mount. It's equipped with a Celestron SkyPortal wifi module for remote control via my iPad Mini 2, or it can be controlled from its own wired hand controller. This is a smaller, less powerful telescope, but it gives me lower-power, wider angle views, which is nice for certain things. If I need a wider angle / lower power view than this scope provides, I use the 50mm electronic finder scope on my bigger telescope (for photography) or I use binoculars - I have 10x50's, but I'd like to also eventually get a pair of bigger binoculars with either 60mm or 70mm objective lenses and a bit more magnification.

 

My bigger telescope is an Orion XT8g. It is what I used for the photos I posted in the OP. It's an 8" Newtonian reflector in a motorized / goto Dobsonian mount. It has a SkyFi wireless controller, a 50mm electronic finderscope (another even smaller 2" achromatic refractor with its own camera), a green laser pointer (great for showing people where to look in the sky with their binoculars to see the same area the telescope is pointed at) and a red dot finder for use in aligning the telescope.

 

Here are a couple of shots of the Orion - the finderscope camera is visible (blue) although the main (cream colored) camera in the picture is an older video camera and not my current camera, and the red dot finder in the pic has also been replaced with a better one. I have a couple of 12V battery packs that can power everything, so I can take the whole shebang out to the middle of the desert (the darker the skies, the better the view) if I want to, although I rarely have the time - I usually observe from my back yard instead.

 

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I have various cameras and the assorted hardware to attach it to just about any telescope. I very rarely use my DLSR (a Canon EOS 1000d) because the other cameras are lighter and more sensitive. The e-finder has a ToupTek GCMOS camera with a AR0130 color sensor, while the other camera (which gets moved between the two telescopes) is a ToupTek GPCMOS01200KPC, which has a Sony IMX224 sensor.

 

The IMX224 equipped cameras are all the rage for EAA (electronically assisted astronomy) right now due to their sensitivity and low noise - and low cost - you can get them for about $150 or so. They allow you to slew the telescope to a target and then watch the "stacked" images appear and brighten and become more detailed on your computer screen in near real time - and that's nice if you have family and friends there because everyone can see the full-color telescope view on the screen in front of them, as opposed to seeing a less detailed image (usually gray) through the eyepiece, which of course only one person can view at a time.

 

There are new cameras coming out with larger CMOS sensor chips, but the same basic sensitivity as the '224 (IMX385 - about $400) and a really nice one that costs about $800-$1,000 (IMX294) that uses an even larger 4/3 sensor format, which I might look into eventually since the larger chip allows you to capture a larger area in the images at once.

 

For software I use an app called SkySafari 5 for controlling the telescopes, and a program called SharpCap Pro for displaying / capturing the images from them.

[Phil O'Keefe]

Moved from HCPP for two reasons - to share with the SSS folks and to test the software, post-update.