Equipment
The garden observatory
The outside observatory is a roll-off-roof shed and houses an Alt 5 ADN mount.
the mount is controlled by a FS-2 controller from Michael Koch. The main instrument 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.
Sometimes I also use a C11 on the Alt 5 ADN...
... and sometimes also a Vixen R200SS.
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. This telescope should do it's work
in the roof observatory in the future.
The roof observatory
When I had to do some work on the roof of my house in summer of 2009, I decided to build an additional roof observatory to use smaller equipment from there.
The two upper segments of the window slide down and open wide enough to give room for the instruments. A Millenium-Mount is the workhorse here. You can also see the small 114mm (f=450mm) homebuilt astrograph and the ST10XME. As the instruments can not be easily decoupled from the flor, the equipment is controlled remotely from my office one floor below.
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.