Equipment

Here I show some of my equipment such as telescopes, cameras, and my mount and tripod. My project pages will show the equipment listed that I used for that project. This is pictures of that equipment shot badly in my apartment with horrible lighting, but hopefully it still gets the point across.

This is my primary deep sky imaging setup with camera, mount, guidescope, guide camera, filterwheel, autofocuser, and of coarse the main telescope.

The main telescope is an Astrotech 115EDT. It’s a refractor with around 4.5 inch (115mm) diameter objective lens. Focal length is 805mm. There is a guide scope on top made by Astromania and it’s objective lens is 60mm in diameter. It’s focal length is 240mm. The guide scope’s main purpose is to keep stars in the same place in it’s field of view my controlling the mount to fix any errors in tracking. The camera on the guide scope is a ZWO 120mm-s. It can also be used in Sharpcap software to do mount polar alignment. The blue box on the back of the main scope is an auto focus cube V2 from Pegasus Astro. Between the focus cube is a field flattener from Hotech called the SCA Field Flattener. Behind that is some extension tubes to get up to 55mm of backspacing to the filter wheel. The big round thing is the ZWO Electronic filter wheel with 8-1.25″ slots for filters. My cameras are all monochrome and while shooting images I use the filter wheel to rotate filters in front of the sensor. Inside the filter wheel is one filter for Light Pollution, Red, Green, Blue, UV/IR for Luminance, Ha (Hydrogen Alpha), SII (Sulfur), and OIII (Oxygen), in each slot. Some of these are listed below with separate pictures. Behind the filter wheel is the main imaging camera, the ZWO 294mm Pro. There is a cooling unit on the back of the camera built in. I use a constant temperature of -10 degrees C during imaging. That is to help with dark current noise in the images. Below the telescope setup is the Skywatcher EQ6R Pro telescope mount on it’s tripod. There are 2 counter weights on the counter weight bar. They are used to balance the telescope. The telescope assembly weighs in about 26lbs. I also can remove all the filter wheel, flattener, camera, and attach my Daystar Quark to image the sun. Most of the closeup images of the sun are done this way, that will be displayed below this.

A closeup of the auto focuser mentioned above.
This is a shot from the back of the telescope above of the camera I use and the filter wheel. The USB hub on there helps with cable management as I plug in the guide camera and filter wheel there instead of running cables to the computer or other USB hub. ZWO really thought stuff through. I guess the designers also image.

Here is my Solar setup that can be combined with refractor telescopes on this page. I remove cameras, filter wheels, and flatteners to insert this in place of them. There’s a Baader IR cut filter on the left end, then a GSO diagonal, then the Daystar Quark Chromosphere solar filter (red and black, then a tilter, then the ZWO 174mm camera.

This is just the back view of the image and description on the left. The Baader IR filter works as an energy rejection filter for the Quark. It’s needed on bigger telescopes.

The Skywatcher EVOSTAR 72ED, not pictured the Orion field flattener for short refractors. Also another guide scope from Astromania (60mm).

This Evostar 72ED was used on a lot of earlier projects. It provided a wider field of view. It’s focal length is 430mm, found by plate solving in software, but it’s advertised focal length is 420mm. After I failed with the Nexstar 6se, pictured below, I bought this and images came out much better, but there was always image tilt somewhere in the images. They show up as elongated stars on one side of the image. I have since stopped using it just for that. Although the Heart nebula was shot with it fairly recently. The Astromania guide scope on top serves as the same thing as above, to keep the stars in the same field of view by moving the mount to keep the stars in the same spot. It can also be used in Sharpcap software to do mount polar alignment.

The Apertura 60mm refractor with the Svbony 30mm guide scope, the field flattener for the 60mm and 72mm refractors, some extension tubes, ZWO electronic filter wheel mini, and ZWO 183mm Pro camera.

I have just received this from High Point Scientific. It’s focal length is 360mm and the objective lens is 60mm in diameter. It is meant for even wider fields of view than the 72ED from above. Objects in space are quite large and this telescope is for those.

Here is the ZWO 183mm Pro and Apertura shot from the back. Pretty much the same as the ZWO 294mm Pro but this one the sensor is smaller. It’s an older camera that I used in the earlier images.
The EQ6R Pro mount with the Nexstar 6se telescope. Also above is the Telrad for finding stars to align to.

This is the telescope I failed at in the beginning. It’s the Nexstar 6se and I began my telescope career on it. It came with a different mount but it’s unstable unless you are just looking through it. This is the setup I use for planets. It’s focal length is 1500mm so it’s quite strong, but no longer my most powerful. That will be below. This is known as a SCT (Schmidt-Cassegrain). It has a 6 inch diameter mirror in the back and another smaller mirror on the front, so that is where the 1500mm focal length comes from. Light comes through the front, hits the mirror in the back, bounces to the front, and then out the back to the eyepiece. There’s no eyepiece here, because I don’t usually look at stuff. I put the ZWO 120mm-s camera and the smaller filter wheel shown above with the Apertura 60mm to image planets. Most of my planet photos come from this telescope at least until probably 2022.

The Meade LX200 EMC “Classic” with a Zhumell focuser for SCT’s

I drove to Arkansas one day to pick this up. It is for planets after late 2021 and beginning 2022. It has a focal length of 2500mm and it has a mirror of 10 inches in diameter. I’ve added a focuser on the back because it can be used to get fine focus for planets. The default focuser on these scopes is quite horrible. It will also probably be used for lunar and maybe white light for solar. It weighs about 60lbs. It was built in 1999.

Same telescope from the back.

These are all the pictures from my equipment above but there are other equipment. For instance the filters inside the filter wheels.

The bigger filter wheel 8-1.25 and 31mm contains filters from Astronomik. They are a German company. The filters in there are listed below.

  1. CLS Light pollution filter. (Usually used as a luminance filter at home.)
  2. Deep sky Red
  3. Deep sky Green
  4. Deep sky Blue
  5. Ha (Hydrogen Alpha) 6nm bandwidth
  6. SII (Sulfur 2) 6nm bandwidth
  7. OIII (Oxygen) 6nm bandwidth
  8. L2 Luminance IR/UV (for galaxies in a dark sky location)

In the smaller filter wheel (ZWO EFW Mini) is the following filters.

  1. ZWO Luminance for ZWO 1600mm camera.
  2. ZWO Red for ZWO 1600MM camera
  3. ZWO Green for ZWO 1600MM camera
  4. ZWO Blue for ZWO 1600MM camera
  5. Empty

I also built a battery box made from a cooler bought at Walmart. I did the wiring myself and drilled holes for cig plugs. I stocked it with a 100 amp hour AGM lead acid battery. It has a fuse box with fuses to keep from blowing up my equipment with surges. I also use it to power my ham radio. It outputs 12 volts. I use a battery from Amazon to power my laptop to control the imaging setup. The 100 amp hour battery weighs 80lbs so I used a cooler that has wheels. So far it works very well except the EQ6R Pro blinks when it is slewing showing there’s not enough current. So it’s not perfect.

I have some dew heater strips to wrap around the objectives of the telescopes. heat keeps the lenses from dewing up. Otherwise they would fog up pretty fast and my imaging night would be over.