Equipment
Until October 2000 my main instrument was a 150/1200mm newtonian Siberia 150. This instrument is also sold under different brands (TAL 2M, Galaxy etc.). One year before I replaced the original mount by a Losmandy G11 to be prepared for astro photography.
To allow photography in the prime focus of the newtonian I bought a
SBIG ST4 autoguider in spring 2000. Manual guiding during 1.5 to 2 hour
exposures on hypered Kodak Technical Pan seemed in no way desirable or
promising. Nevertheless the first attempts of guiding with the ST4 and
a guidescope were a total mess. Instead of small dots I found long strokes
on my negatives. Due to this fact the construction of mounting the guidescope
to the newtonian was modified several times and I tried several different
settings of the ST4. The results became better but not really satisfying.
In October 2000 I decided to buy a larger instrument, which should allow
shorter exposure times, off-axis-guiding and which should fit to my Losmandy
mount. I decided for a Celestron 11 with a Lumicon Giant Easy Guider. The
Giant Easy Guider can be used in different modes like f/10, f/6.5, f/5.5
and f/4. Who is interessted in more details about the GEG should take a
look at the excelent article by Philip Perkins (see linklist).
In September 2001 the G11 mount was replaced by an Alt 5 ADN mount with
much more load capacity and higher precision. This mount is
controlled by the FS-2 Goto Telescope Control System
from Michael Koch.
This is the 300mm homebuilt newtonian on the Alt 5 ADN mount. The instrument has an aperture of 300mm (12 inches)
and a focal length of 1200mm. In combination with a Televue Paracorr the resulting focal length is about 1360mm.
Here you can see the 200/800mm newtonian Vixen R200SS with the 70/700mm guidescope on the Alt mount. Note the nice colorful dewshield. On the inside it is of course black.
My equipment is completed by a small EQ5 mount for mobile use,
a 120/600mm achromatic refractor, a 70/700mm refractor as guidescope,
a CCD camera ST10XME from SBIG, a Canon EOS 300D, several SLR cameras, several lenses from
24mm to 1000mm focal length, several eyepieces and a lot of other small
things.