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Equipment

The equipment shown on these pages is the personal equipment of the author, acquired painfully and slowly over the years.

Starting out

Never underestimate your eyes!. If you live in a dark sky area, those of us who live in cities would love to see what you see... Learn your way around the sky now - it helps so much later on. You can see so much from a dark sky site -Orions nebula is easy - but can you see M33 or Praesepe, or even the dark nebula in the Milky Way ?

The Department Store

The initial acquisition is always the small department store refractor on an alt-azimuth mount. ( thats up and down and side-to-side to the rest of us ). When you get tired of fiddling with the rubbish tripod, you get back to your Dad's binoculars and try and mount them on his decent tripod.

Homebuild Barn-door camera mount

Then you start building barn-door mounts for hand-guided astronomy phots. Here's mine:

The results are underneath the mounts in the pictures.

Homebuild Newtonian Reflector

At this point I nagged my Dad to death and worked extra hard to pursuade Father Christmas to get me a mirror set for Christmas. In the end I received an 8" F/6 from Bretmain in Sussex. This was forced into a 10" drainage plastic pipe and a Meade orthoscopic eyepiece purchased to accompany it. It was then I started to understand the difficulties of photography - especially with a Newtonian - it means moving mirrors to achieve focusing distance and re-balancing the scope because of this awkward projection from the side. The camera mount in its eventual construction was a butchered lab stand from Gallenkamp with an arm with a 1/4" Whitworth thread on the end to carry the camera over the eyepiece. This telescope has long been sold, complete with mounting and drives but the memories of Cornwall during the summer holiday linger on.

The Assheton Observatory at Rossall School, Fleetwood

My next stroke of luck was that my senior school had its own observatory housing a 6" Cooke refractor on an enormous clockwork driven equatorial mounting. On further investigation I discovered the more you looked, the more there were of them - the Jeremiah Horrocks Observatory in Preston and the 7" at the Upholland Seminary in Lancashire to name two.

The Cooke was an enormous instrument with telescopes to read the declination axis dial, tube illuminators to provide micrometer field illumination and shutters over the objective lens. The first job though was to repair the weight driven clock drive which suffered from chipped and broken gear teeth. Once this was done, it was astonishing how accurate a governor-controlled simple clock drive could be..

The next steps - refractors

	My first real purchase ( i.e. hard earned cash ) was the second-hand Vixen SP102 refractor. This I bought while a student at University College London, from a chap called Chris who worked at the observatory. That setup came with a extending Vixen tripod and a Celestron 60mm f/12 refractor for nothing. All in all £650.
	So I made some mounting rings for the Celestron to use as a guide scope for the main refractor and used that rather a lot in the back graden -it used to stand permanently in the dining room waiting for the evenings inner-city observing. Of course as everyone does, I blew up the vixen handcontroller and had to make my own based on the Manchester Astronomical Society's barn-door drive circuit. It works a treat!. The picture shows the telescope on the pier I picked up from a RAL materials sale. It can go up and down and is anchored into the ground on top of three draqin pipes full of concrete sunk 2' into the ground. Bolts are fixed into the concrete and the tripod base mount on these.
	Then while studying for my Astronomy PhD I received the gift of a 6" Cassegrain which I then proceed to create a mounting plate for so that it could sit alongside the Vixen refractor which now became the main guidescope.
	But I also took time out to buy a Vixen camera tracking mount - which is basically a GP-DX mount without the declination head. Second-hand of course- but it is fantastic. Retailing at about £550 from Orion in the UK , I bought it from Bognor for £250 in pristine condition.
	Finally, now I'm a homeowner with a large shed and starting to bring up a family -I can't afford to run around the countryside dragging family and scope with me, so a larger scope and a homebuilt observatory are in order. That gets rid of the setting up time and a decent CCD camera ameliorates of the lack of dark skies in the South East of the UK. The solution is to build your own observatory and computer control both the telescope ( Vixen Sky Sensor 2000 PC on Vixen GP-DX mounting ) and the onservatory ( watch this space - geodesic dome coming shortly...... including web-control from the internet.....)

Accessories

The other small parts are the accessories - what do you need to do some astronomy ?. Over the years I have accumulated lots of parts, again mostly second-hand or bought through mail from the states or frm other astronomers. Here is a picture of the current working set. the top tray are the eyepieces : 40mm, 32mm, 26, 20, 15 and 12 mm Meade Series 4000 and the Powermate 2.5x Barlow lens. I wear glasses so I cannot get on with short focal length eyepieces. Hence I use the powermate to effectively shorten the focal length of the longer focal length eyepices to reach higher magnifications more comfortably. I also own a 9mm and a 5mm Vixen eyepiece which I cannot use because of their short focal length.

The second tray from the top contains the Herschel Wedge solar filter - more about that here.

The third tray from top contains a Vixen AG3 illumated guider unit. This consists of a x3 barlow in front of a semi-silvered mirror assembly used to project a illuminated and adjustable reticle into the observers eyepiece. This makes it really easy to find and track on a guide star at high accuracy during astrophotography. On the right side of the tray is the right-angle prism used to turn the image through 90° when the image is near zenith. There are also the various adapters that allow screwing of these units into the telescope focuser unit.

The bottom deep foam tray contains the cameras.Only one is pictured here. There are now two OM1s in this case, along with t-adapters and telescope camera adapter on the right hand side which allows for both projection and prime focus photography through the telescope.

I should also mention the autoscope project here - the code and schematics suitable for the Vixen SP mounting and any other stepper-driven telescope are here

If you're anything like me you also keep your eyes open around the junk shops for shutters, motors, cheap cameras and the like. I even once saw a 6" Fullerscope reflector and driven mount for sale in a local Free-ads paper for £50 ! A mate beat me to it though.

Photography

Here's an excel spreadsheet with references for astronomical exposure times AstroExposure.xlsand also the application provided by Michael Covington to do the same : astrezip.exe. Ispend most of my time taking photos with the various equipment and you can find them throughout the image database with xls preadsheets describing the arrangement and exposure times.

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