Astrophotography: My next Telescope

Celestron 6" refractor

After spending the next week or so doing alot of research into Astrophotography and the techniques involved it turned out that I had 1 major problems (or so i thought at this point..) My 12? Meade was mounted on an Alt/Azimuth mount. This is a fork type mount that whilst very user friendly is useless for any long exposure work of Deep Space Objects. This is because instead of smoothly tracking the sky they effectively zig-zag or step as they track meaning 1; you get field rotation and 2; the stepping across the sky causes uneven exposure to the film.

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My research taught me that i required a mount that was known as a German equatorial mount, this is built differently and is polar aligned so that the scope tracks smoothly across the sky in one axis only. I decided to go and buy a package, as you can see in the photo it was fairly big! a Celestron mount as a 6? 1.2 meter refractor!

The first night I took the refractor out I was hugely excited at the prospect of the photos we could now get! Toby and I setup the telescope, polar aligned it, found Andromeda attached the telescope and started snapping away. We started with a 1 minute exposure but all we got was messy blurs! What the hell was going on? We spent the rest of the night experimenting but just could not get a decent picture! Time for yet more research!

Next Chapter: The costs start mounting up!

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