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Saturday, 17 January 2015

colour me confused

I decided to give this Astrophography malarky a try, I have this:

So I trotted out one night in December and stuck the camera on a tripod, connected the remote commander gubbins and took some photos, the didn't come out too bad. I did some reading and learned a bit more about taking photos of the night sky, I trotted out again and had another go, they came out a bit better, plus I managed to photo the ISS. Yay, go me!






I also have this:

This is a SkyWatcher EQ3-2 mount, it's very technical. However, this is a much better tripod than the one I put my camera on. So I figured that it might be a good idea to slap my camera on to this mount, easy! Um... no! not even close to easy. It turns out that in order to use the EQ mount for astrophotography I needed some more kit, of course I would, I never take up a hobby where I don't have to spend money, that would be too easy. So I did some more research trawling the interweb to learn what I would need.
It turns out that there's a lot of astrophotography kit that's dedicated for the task. But it's got quite the price tag on it, so I did a bit more web trawling and I also phoned a telescope sales chap. I asked about a set up called the SkyWatcher Star Adventurer, very pricey, particularly when you add on on the fact that the whole shibang needs a decent tripod to put it all on. The telescope selling chap talked me guy talked me out of it, go fig, His reasoning was that I already have the EQ3-2 mount, so all I needed was a motor drive kit and a bracket to mount the camera on.

So I bought this:

It's an L bracket. Of course it is! The bottom bit is a dovetail thingy that goes on the mount itself, the on the bit that sticks up, the problem is that I don't have clue on how to put all three bits together, I'm sure I'll figure it out.