The Astro Rig
Whilst the skies are filled with clouds and the rain descends by the bucketful, I thought I’d post up an image or three of what the fully assembled astrophotography rig looks like.
As you can deduce from the first two images, my view of the night skies can be quite restricted. I’ve talked about this before, but my location stops me from imaging almost anything under 30 degrees or so when facing North. Which means waiting until December / January before I can see highlights such as Orion and the Pleiades.
Let’s have a bit of explanation as to what’ you’re looking at. From left to right:
The black box under the objective end of the telescope is my home-made power distribution box. I do need to install some fuses (to protect all my lovely and expensive equipment) but can’t (yet) find a fuse box that’s small enough. Under that is the USB3 hub that connects all the equipment back to my laptop.
The black and red item on the front of the mount is the PoleMaster polar alignment camera. I do not know how people can use the standard polar alignment scope in these mounts. It’s rubbish. I have removed (and sold) mine.
The red box is the EAF (Electronic Automatic Focuser), with the red and black guide scope and guide camera above the focuser assembly of the telescope.
Finally, we have the 0.85 reducer / flattener and the dedicated astro camera. The reducer / flattener serves two roles. These are to boost the scope’s focal ratio (by reducing the focal length to 357mm) and to smooth out the image distortion. At the full 420mm focal length, the stars are visibly distorted in the corners of the image. The flattener significantly reduces this distortion and gives round stars across the image.
I still need to work on my cable management. It’s better than it was, but there’s still a way to go before I can really say that I’m happy with how everything is wired up.
The rig, all set and ready...
Here, you can see the guide scope offset to the right. This is an attempt to counter-act the weight of the EAF on the left. On this setup, it’s probably not really needed but every little bit helps when it comes to balancing and quality of tracking.
The guide camera and the EAF connect to the USB2 hub inside the astro camera, which in turn uses a USB3 connection to transfer data back to the laptop.
Note also that the three power leads have a red band on the ‘distribution box end’. As the cables have different sized plus on each end, this makes setup a little bit quicker and easier.
The little green circle at the top of the tripod leg is a bubble-level to assist in getting the mount level. It’s not super accurate but it does a good enough job. I do have a small spirit level in the mount storage box, in case I can’t easily see the small one.
The rig, from the pilot's seat
This is just another view of the optical assembly. Not terribly exciting…
