Posts Made By: Duncan Kitchin

Hello everybody...

I'm looking for opinions on autoguiders. I'd be particularly interested if anybody has experience/opinions on a Meade Pictor 201XT.

Many thanks in advance for any info

Regards
Duncan

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

I said I'd write up my current adventures in trying to autoguide my EQ-3...

it seems a little off-topic for here, so I'll post the link over at the "equipment talk" list.

Best Regards
Duncan

I've just written up a description of my experiences so far trying to make a low-cost autoguider setup working with my Orion EQ-3 mount. The page is here:

http://www.duncankitchin.com/jump.htm?page=astrophotography/articles/autoguiding/index.htm

lots of caveats to mention - the biggest one being that I haven't actually taken any guided pictures with this yet. I'm still testing it (and hoping for a few more clear nights), but it seems to be working mostly so far (there is a list of what I'm doing on the "operation" sub-page). I thought I'd better start documenting what I've done before I get too far behind to be able to catch up.

Any comments or corrections gratefully appreciated...

Best Regards
Duncan

Tyler,
I'm not exactly an expert here (and importantly, I don't have a G-11 ) but I think you will need either a relay box (which you may want to make yourself) or a serial cable.

Important question - do you have the Gemini goto on your G-11? The means you use to hook it up will be different for each case

Regards
Duncan

yikes! That's a big scope. I can't say I have any particularly good suggestions (much less any relevant experience...), but my first thought would be a horseshoe mount.

Just out of curiosity, where did you find an objective of that size?

Regards
Duncan

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

wow - great picture. I love the resolution of stars in the core...

Best Regards
Duncan

update...

I ran another test earlier this evening. Conditions are somewhat frustrating right now - it has been completely obscured for several straight weeks with only the occasional break. The clouds partially cleared today for long enough for me to try some more testing.

I finally have some kind of declination guiding working, but it isn't fully functional yet. It will now guide on both axes for a few minutes, but then suddenly the mount starts to drift much more radically in the declination direction, and the guiding can't keep up. I suspect I have some flexure issues in my Rube Goldberg-esque guidescope mount. Description here:

http://www.duncankitchin.com/jump.htm?page=astrophotography/articles/autoguiding/guidescope.htm

There are some things I can do to fix this (assuming it is the problem). I'll try that and see what happens...

complete description so far is here:

http://www.duncankitchin.com/jump.htm?page=astrophotography/articles/autoguiding/index.htm

any suggestions, comments or corrections much appreciated.

Best Regards
Duncan

very nice!

That's quite a suite of tools you're using for postprocessing. I'm very interested in your use of IRIS - I have played with that, but haven't figured it out at all. I'd be interested to know more about your workflow.

Best Regards
Duncan