Introduction

Hello everybody...

I've been lurking here for a while (and enjoying the terrific pictures posted here - many thanks to everybody for those), and even making the occasional post, but I thought I should introduce myself.

I'm something of a beginner to imaging, but gradually improving and learning as I go - somewhat curtailed recently due to an extended period of lousy sky conditions here in Northwest Oregon. It actually cleared a little tonight and I was able to try a few things.

I have what you might call a rather modest setup - my main telescope is an Orion 6" Newtonian on an EQ3 mount with dual drives. I started out with a Canon PowerShot A70 and Scopetronix afocal adapter, which at least allowed me to get some reasonable Moon photographs and photographs of a few brighter DSOs. A couple of months ago I acquired a Canon Digital Rebel, but only managed a few test shots before the clouds closed in for several straight weeks.

In the meantime, I've been working on a few modifications:

I made some new oak tripod legs, which is a great stability/vibration improvement over the stock hollow aluminum legs that ship with the EQ3.
I've built a relay box that connects a laptop to the mount's hand controller for autoguiding.
I also picked up an ETX90 OTA on ebay to use as a guidescope, and I have an (unmodified) webcam in a wooden box attached to the camera port.

Tonight I did manage to run a test of my new guiding setup and it worked much better than I had hoped - at least in RA. I have some horrible backlash issues in the declination axis of my mount which rendered any declination adjustments completely non-functional. Hope to mitigate that by some fine tuning.

Anyway - looking forward to some clear nights and hopefully I'll have some presentable pictures to post.

I guess I'd better go and strip down that dec assembly... :-)

Best Regards
Duncan

Hi Duncan!
Welcome to the Forum.

Alex

Welcome to The Forum Duncan!
My first scope was an Orion 6" SVD EQ reflector, mounted on their GOLD version of an EQ-3... loved it!

Clear skies! 8)

by the way, I guess I should post some actual pictures...

from my prior setup with a Canon PowerShot:

http://www.duncankitchin.com/jump.htm?page=astrophotography/moon/index.htm
http://www.duncankitchin.com/jump.htm?page=astrophotography/dso/m13/index.htm
http://www.duncankitchin.com/jump.htm?page=astrophotography/dso/m57/index.htm

and one with my Digital Rebel - I'm calling this one a "test shot" on the grounds I didn't really do a proper setup - but it's the only thing I got before the clouds moved in, so here it is anyway...

http://www.duncankitchin.com/jump.htm?page=astrophotography/dso/m42/index.htm

none of these are very good - but I guess that means I can only improve from here

Best Regards
Duncan

Welcome Duncan..
You've come up with some very respectable images for your first shots...once you get the guiding down and master the focusing process, it all gets better from there...well, it's supposed to anyway..
Don Spencer

Duncan,

Welcome and thanks for sharing the images. They are quite good - some of my first images are quite amusing.

I have owned Orion Equipment as well - just sold my StarMax 127 . So I have had some experience with the EQ3 as well. I never tried to autoguide with it, but I do remember the DEC backlash could be daunting. You may have heard of the "East side heavy" technique for RA. You can do something similar in DEC by deliberately offsetting your polar alignmnet a tad and then unbalancing DEC a little so the DEC drift correction is preloaded against the weight of the DEC unbalance. I know, its a Rube Goldberg approach, but it might be worth a try.