Category Archives: Astro Equipment

Arrival of my 27mm Tele Vue Panoptic

Posted on September 28, 2012 by james

Whilst my Baader Genuine Orthos are fine in my 10″ dob the largest focal length I have is 18mm and the longer focal length lenses I have from my Revelation kit just aren’t up to coping with such a fast … Continue reading →

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Another wide field Andromeda Galaxy Attempt

Posted on September 22, 2012 by james

Fresh from my previous attempt at this I repeated the process, but this time in the capture application (APT) I pushed the live view zoom up to 10x and set the emulated ISO setting to 1600 with an exposure as … Continue reading →

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Solar Imaging with the 127 Mak

Posted on September 11, 2012 by james

Someone was asking about the set-up of a solar imaging system, so I took these photos of mine “in action”. There’s really nothing special here other than the motor focuser that I cobbled onto the back of the Mak. The … Continue reading →

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10″ Dob First Light

Posted on September 5, 2012 by james

Unbelievably it’s actually six weeks since I managed this, but I got around to writing it up in the end… Very unexpectedly, having finished my dob build the day before, around midnight there was a break in the cloud and … Continue reading →

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Filtering Light Pollution for Wide Field Star Images

Posted on September 5, 2012 by james

I’ve been taking some wide field images of the night sky with my Canon 450D recently and whilst we have very little light pollution here compared with most places in the UK, even a small amount bleeds into longer exposure … Continue reading →

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My 10″ Dobsonian ‘build’

Posted on August 20, 2012 by james

I’ve quoted the word ‘build’ because in some respects this turned out not to be. However, there’s a fair bit of woodwork involved, so I reckon it still counts… Some months back I wrote that I had obtained a 10″ … Continue reading →

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Dovetail Adaptor for Old EQ3-2 Mounts

Posted on July 12, 2012 by james

My EQ3-2 is one of the older models that has fittings for scope rings, but doesn’t have any form of dovetail clamp. The new models have both. I prefer to use dovetails as it makes swapping scopes around between mounts … Continue reading →

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50mm Binocular Objective Finder Howto

Posted on June 28, 2012 by james

My second right-angle finder based on a binocular objective is now built (if not yet cosmetically finished) and this time I’ve taken photos so I can now document the construction process. My aim was to make a functioning right-angle finder … Continue reading →

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Fan-Cooled Xbox Live Camera Howto

Posted on June 23, 2012 by james

I modded a second Xbox Live camera to add a fan today and this time took photos, so here’s how it’s done. This one is slightly different from the first in that I’ve not chopped down the lens housing to … Continue reading →

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Fan-Cooled Xbox Live Camera for Planetary Imaging

Posted on June 17, 2012 by james

The Xbox Live camera has found something of a following as a cheap planetary/lunar imaging camera since the SPC900 (which is undoubtedly a far better camera) started fetching silly prices. I’ve always found it very noisy however. The camera does … Continue reading →

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