Alister's Astronomy Pages

Welcome to my astronomy imaging page. I am new to astronomy having taken it up last Autumn with the purchase of a 5 inch skywatcher refracter. Since then I have purchased may differing telescopes, mounts and othe dvices in search of my perfect all round telescope. To be honest I have yet to find that magical and ellusive all-round telescope but I am getting close.

I live in a town on te outskirts of London and almost all of my observing is done from my back garden where I have to contend with all kinds of light pollution. The light pollution really limits what I can actually observe, however I soon found that with tools such as photoshop I could remove the anoying skyglow from images taken through my telescopes. As a result most of my astronomy efforts go in to imaging. This page is a work in progress and will follow my attempts at capturing some of the man wonders of the night sky.

My very first imaging target was Saturn during March of 2006. I used a simple Phillips webcam and my Skywatcher evostar 120 telescope. It really is amazing what can be achieved with a very simple low cost setup.

I soon realised that imaging was what I wanted to do. I was also hit by aperture fever, the desire for a bigger and bigger telescope. My next scope was a Skywatcher 200mm newtonian. Once again Saturn was my target of choice and my Phillips ToUcam webcam was used along with registax software to stack the video frames into a single still frame.

The Skywatcher Newtonian was a very good telescope and to this day I regret selling it, I got my very first glimpse of a distant Galaxy with the 8" but aperture fever was running high and but I got the opportunity to buy a 10" Meade LX200 Schmidt Cassegrain which sounded like a good deal so the Newtonian was sold.

To go with the LX200 I got a Meade DSI MK1 single shot colour camera. This was purchased second hand for £100.00 and to be honest I think this is a great little camera. Yes there are newer more sensitive versions but the orgiginal DSI can produce great results for very little money. My first target was M51. This image was created out of a number of 30 second exposures stacked using the suplied Meade software. Although the LX200 came with an equatorial wedge almost all of my imaging with it was done using the Alt-Az mode as for me it tracked better. I have since learnt that the bulk of my tracking issues were down to poor polar alignment.

Next year I plan to target M51 again. This is a really nice target and with everything I have since learnt I want to have a more in depth go at this deep sky object again.

One of the biggest problems with the LX200 is te weight of the telescope tube (OTA) and fork assembly. As I don't have a permanent setup each night I would have to lug the 30Kg assembly out and have to lift it up on to the wedge. This was a pain and difficult in the dark. At the same time I discovered that the main mirror in the LX200 was damaged and had holes in the reflective coating. The mirror went away to be re coated with some enhanced coatings and the OTA was separtated from the forks and a goto celestron CG4 GT mount was purchased.

To go with the new mount a new camera was also purchased. I was really looking for a second hand Meade DSI Mk2 but could not find one when a cheap SAC 10 camera came up at a good price. This is a cooled 3.3 megapixel camera which sound like a great thing to have, but the pixels are very small so it's not ideal as my LX200 OTA can't actually focus starlight down onto a single pixel so there is a sensitivity loss. It's not the end of the world, it just means I need to expose for a bit longer.

To see the results from my LX200/CG4/SAC 10 set up please go to the next page.