Astro equipment

Astro equipment

Telescopes:

	This is my 120mm f5 refractor. It is a low power, widefield telescope and nice use with 2" eyepieces. Here it is on an EQ3-2 equatorial mount with a RA drive.
	These are my 10x50 binoculars. They are 'junk quality' but nevertheless surprisingly useful, especially when I use them with my homemade parallelogram mount.
	The mount is mostly made from 12mm square section steel tube plus a few other metal oddments and a spare counterweight from my EQ mount.

	Here is my second scope - it is a 127mm Maksutov Cassegrain from Orion which I bought when in the USA July 2004. I wanted a nice compact planetary and lunar scope and I have been very pleased with it.
	Another view of the Mak. The finder on it is the Orion 9x50 right angle model and this is really good. I would strongly recommend this to anyone looking to get a 50mm right angle finder.
	This is my newest (December 2006) scope, a Celestron 9.25"/235mm Schmidt-Cassegrain. I chose this scope as it is somewhat renowned for planetary imaging and observing and is probably the largest sensible size for a telescope that will have to be carried some distance evey time I set up for observing. Things I like so far - it has allowed me to see and image objects and detail that was beyond the reach of the 5" Mak. Things I don't like - the days of being able to take the whole scope+mount+counterweights in and out in one trip are over! It takes so much longer to set up and take down...
	These 20x80 binoculars are great for widefield views of open clusters etc. They are really too heavy to hand hold and I'll be able to get more use from them when I have modified my parallelogram mount to take them. Without this, it's almost impossible to use them for observing objects at high elevations.
	This is some of my eyepiece collection so far. At one stage I think I was becoming an eyepiece addict. There are a couple of expensive TeleVue ones, the others are all fairly standard types. Best value for money has to be the Telescope House orthoscopics (front row) and the 2" Plossls from Surplusshed.

Cameras

	The humble webcam is capable of great things in the service of astroimaging. I have two Phillips ToUcam Pro II webcams, one of which is now modified with a high sensitivity monochrome CCD. These are my principle tools for planetary and Lunar imaging at present. Large numbers of 640x480 pixel frames may be acquired as a video clip and subsequently the best frames may be automatically selected and combined to deliver dramatic reductions in noise and to offset the effects of atmospheric turbulence. This low cost hardware is complimented by no-cost software such as the excellent Registax application for frame stacking and processing.
	This is my newest camera (Novemeber 2008) and I am compiling a more detailed review of it here.
	This is my DSLR, a Canon Digital Rebel (sold as 300D in Europe). I have not used this for astroimaging as much as the webcams as its strengths lie in areas other than planetary imaging. It is a capable tool for widefield and deep sky imaging as many imagers more skilled than myself have shown.