My Astronomy Equipment

I have a very modest setup when it comes to astrophotography. My telescope, a Meade DS114 reflector, is small by most standards. The telescopes clear aperture is 4.5 inches, and its focal length is 1000mm thanks to a relay lens in the focus tube. This gives it a focal ratio of f/8.8. The telescopes resolution power is 1.0 arc second and its max power is 325x. The telescope sits atop a motorized  Altazimuth GOTO mount.

For all practical purposes this is a beginners telescope, and this is just fine for me as I am just that, a beginner. The most important thing to getting the most out of this or any reflector is to keep it properly collimated. It is not unheard of for a small telescope to outperform another telescope twice its aperture size just because the smaller one is very well collimated while the larger one is not. So don't take collimation for granted and always check for proper alignment of all mirrors and lenses before you go out for a night of star gazing.

Simply going out and choosing different objects to explore from your handheld controller, if you have a computerized GOTO mount, or via star charts can be great fun. This can be a great way to get to know the night sky. You will notice though that many objects which you try to view will simply look like fuzzy blobs through the eyepiece. Nothing spectacular to say the least! The Orion Nebula is an example of an exception to this rule. You can make out a lot of detail with the naked eye and an eyepiece when it comes to this nebula. Other objects like the Andromeda galaxy look like a fuzzy ball even though the galaxy is huge and very near by! This is where a webcam modified for long exposures comes in very handy.

With such a camera you can capture stunning photographs of deep sky objects which otherwise look like fuzz balls of light. The picture to the right is of the modified webcam I use for this purpose. The webcam is a Logitech QC Pro 3000. There are better options out there for deep sky work, but at this time this is what my budget will allow. Nevertheless, I am very satisfied with how this webcam has performed so far. I am now able to take deep sky photographs successfully. This has been a dream for me since I was a youngster, and I never would have imagined that I would be doing it with an inexpensive web camera. Boy, how times have changed.

I have purchased a few filters that I feel are very important for astrophotography. Because webcams are sensitive in the IR range as well as the visible range, if not filtered, the images captured tend to not be of very good quality. After all, you normally just want to capture the visible light not

the IR light. This is not always the case, but normally you want to cut out the IR range and UV range, and just leave the visible light range. The filter in the bottom right of the picture is my Baader Planetarium UV/IR-Cut-Filter. I can screw this filter directly onto the webcam adaptor.

 

Another very important yet rather expensive filter is the H-alpha filter. This filter, top center, blocks all light wavelength except for the 656nm H-alpha emission line. In other words this filter effectively filters out all light pollution found around most backyard observatories. This filter is mostly used for H-alpha emitting nebulae and tends to lower the amount of light which reaches the CCD. This is not always a bad thing as it allows for longer exposure times without over exposure problems. A good  focal length reducer (FLR) is a great addition to any telescope setup, and a must for astrophotography in my opinion. An FLR screwed onto an eyepiece or CCD camera effectively increases your field of view and amount of light reaching your eye or CCD chip.  The trade off is less magnification. I use an Atik x.5 FLR pictured bottom left.

My Meade DS114 came equipped with an Altazimuth GOTO mount as already mentioned previously. This mount is not adequate for exposure times of much more than thirty seconds due to motor drift and field rotation. I have learned this fact from experience. Trying to take long exposure photographs with  this mount is a frustrating task to say the very least. Due to this I decided to purchase an Orion EQ1 equatorial mount, and an Orion EQ1M electronic drive system. With this mount system I am now able to polar align my telescope, which in all reality is the setup of choice when it comes to astrophotography. By using an equatorial mount as opposed to an Altazimuth mount you solve the problem of field rotation, so long as the mount is accurately aligned with the celestial pole.

Focusing of the telescope can pose problems as well. I have had many instances were the object I am trying to focus gets bumped out of the eyepiece or webcam field of view due to trying to focus the object by hand. To solve this problem I purchased a Mead #1240 Electronic focuser. My electronic focuser can be seen in the picture to the right. This device is indispensable when it comes to astrophotography, and should be near the top of your "need to get list."

Update: I recently purchased a used Meade DSI Pro from eBay as I was noticing that I was reaching the limits of what my Logitech QC Pro 3000 modified webcam was capable of achieving. The biggest problem with the Logitech is the sensitivity of its ccd chip. I was having to take longer and longer exposure times in attempts to image dimmer DSOs. A perfect example of one of these dim DSOs is the Horsehead nebula, B33/IC434. With the Logitech I was taking two minute exposures through a 135mm SLR lens, and even at these exposure times I was only getting hints of the Hoursehead nebula. You can see these attempts on my astrophotography gallery under IC434. This was becoming very frustrating for me, and really the only solution was to acquire a more sensitive camera.

 

After my Meade DSI Pro arrived a set out to test how sensitive it really was compared to my Logitech. Well, my first night out images are also posted in my gallery and they consist of two DSOs, the Orion and Flame nebulas. I was extremely impressed with the results of these two first attempts. I set the exposure time on the DSI Pro to only fifteen seconds, and I was able to capture more detail from the Orion and Flame nebulas than I ever was able to with my Logitech. I then tried my luck at the Horsehead nebula with an exposure time of fifteen seconds. I have posted this image on my gallery as well, and I have to say that the results blew me away. In my wildest dreams could I have ever though I would be taking images like this! I could have never accomplished this with my Logitech with such short exposure times.

I have also added a Meade DSI Color to my list of equipment. This is a good camera if you don't want to worry about RGB filters to try to get color images. The DSI Color is not as sensitive and doesn't have as good a resolution as the DSI Pro, but it does come in handy. At any rate, I still have a place in my heart for my Logitech webcam as it was the camera that gave me my very first successful DSO images. I just feel I have outgrown it. It would work great as an auto guiding camera though, so I will certainly keep it.    
 

Well, this is my primary astrophotography setup. Rather simple yet quite effective.