I thought that I would start a blog following my initial wanderings into astrophotography. I always thought that it would not interest me, but I also said that I didn't fancy a Dob!

So; I have two aims which I am moving towards;

1. Using a Lodestar camera with the Lodestar Live ap.

2. Using my Olympus dslr (E620) or perhaps even my old E300.

1.With the Lodestar in mind I have recently bought a Mac Powerbook, which is start because otherwise I only have a desktop machine. One aim is to control the mount from indoors and see images on the screen in comfort, perhaps even sketching from them. Is this cheating?

2. The aim here would be too use either existing lenses, or connect the camera(s) to various scopes. I am not sure that I would risk trying to mod the old one myself, and I want to keep the E620 for normal use, so for the moment I would be using them unmodded.

The story so far:

1. I have the Powerbook loaded up with some Planetarium apps and Eqmac for the remote guiding bit. I have tested out all possible combinations and some simply won't connect to my AZEQ6GT. But a promising combination seems to be Sky Safari 4 Pro plus Eqmac. For some reason Sky Safari won't connect to the mount directly even though this version now has Skywatcher in the menu. I have only tried the laptop guiding once under clear skies and did not crack the sync to ensure that objects are centred - that's next.

Yesterday I received the Lodestar camera which connects OK to the Macbook but there doesn't seem to be any way to test it out further except under clear skies - which are at a premium at the mo. Sunday looks like being the first opportunity to try it.

2. I've got an adapter for my scopes, and various lenses, but that's it so far. I was ready to fix the camera to the mount the other night and try M31 for starters but then cloud intervened.

Ongoing.....

Kerry