Joel Shepherd

This has been my winter project: a dual-scope rig that I can operate fully remotely. Between Seattle winter weather, some issues getting the spacing right on a new focuser, misconfiguration disguised as mechanical failure on the smaller focuser, and (of course) misalignments between the two scopes, it took me six months to go from decision to the first successful, "fully remote" overnight run. (It's in my back yard at the moment, but operated via RemotePC over the interwebs.) On top is a TEC-140, bottom is a SkyWatcher Esprit ED-80 on an Optec Libra plate. The Libra plate is a nice piece of kit: heavy, but easy to adjust and holds its position night after night. We're in urban Seattle, so it is not dark, but soon this all will be heading somewhere much, much darker.

6 hours ago, shazstars01 said:

Thanks Joel, very helpful. 

Would you also recommend this sort of fast refractor (say an ED80 DS Pro) for planetary imaging (plus sun, moon) in your experience? Has that worked well for you? 

PS. Some great shots on your Astrobin 😀

Thanks! One of the many challenging things about astrophotography is that planetary/lunar imaging and deep space imaging (nebula, galaxies, clusters, etc.) are different ballgames. Planets are small, bright, rotate quickly and are sensitive to seeing conditions, so you need long focal length and lots of short exposures. Deep space things are big, dim, slow moving and a little less impacted by poor seeing, so you need smaller numbers of longer exposures. From that perspective, an SCT will work better on planets than a fast refractor because of its much higher focal length, if you use an appropriate camera, etc. But, if you decide to move on to deep space, the SCT will make life harder. An ED80 won't produce very good results for planetary -- it just can't get "close" enough" -- but will happily manage deep space and lunar. Solar photography is another ballgame and I don't have enough experience with it to recommend anything. I will say that the reason I went with deep space instead of planetary was because deep space stuff is always there, whereas planetary is a little more hit or miss. E.g., from here (Seattle), Jupiter and Saturn have been pretty much out of sight for a year or so, especially compared to 4-5 years ago when they were located high in the mid-evening sky. On the other hand, the Veil is reliably up high every summer night. 🙂    Have fun!

The AVX is a fine mount for getting started with astrophotography and I personally found that with ASPA I could get well enough aligned for 10 minute exposures. You have to be careful and a reticulated eyepiece (ie, with crosshairs) is a big help. The SCT on the other hand ... ? SCTs have long focal lengths and narrow fields of view which makes everything more challenging. Focusing, guiding, aligning, etc. : that long focal length will add substantially to the difficulty and the precision required. Consider getting the mount and separately getting a short, fast refractor, in the 60-100mm aperture range. You’ll get great pictures, learn a lot and suffer a lot less frustration (note that I didn’t say no frustration 😉 ). 

I’m interested in learning about EVAA for outreach, but as an astrophotographer ... it’s not as interesting to me personally. It’d be more of a thrill to see a couple gray blobs and know it’s M51’s photons impinging on my own eyeballs. Whether that thrill is worth the cost of a big Dob ... hmm. 

Thanks @Paz and @Piero: I appreciate the first-hand experiences. It'd be cool to have a big scope ... but I'm not it can really be justified given our sky conditions. Good food for thought.

We live under Bortle 6 skies (18.6 on the SQM). With a 4-6” reflector or Newt, we can see open and globular clusters, the Ring and Dumbbell, Andromeda, etc. I’m wondering how much difference we’d see with a 14-16” Dobsonian. Would there be noticeably more detail in the clusters. Could we see some of the smaller, brighter galaxies (M51, M63 etc.) Does the aperture make that much of a difference under a fair amount of LP?

Interested to hear others’ experiences. 

Thanks — Joel. 

I have an Esprit 80mm and ran it on an AVX for about two years. While I can't compare it to the Explore Scientific, I will say that the Esprit is a no-muss no-fuss scope. It works well for imaging, it produces nice stars without color aberrations, has a decent focuser on it and one which is easily motorized if you want to go that far ... it's a keeper.

It actually worked just fine on the AVX. The main issue I had with the AVX -- and I think this was mount specific and not a general AVX issue -- is that periodically, typically after an hour of guiding, the mount would suddenly veer way off on the DEC axis, guiding would fail and I'd have to manually get things going again. Not the end of the world, but it meant I couldn't go to sleep. ?  But otherwise, I enjoyed two good years of imaging with the Esprit 80 and AVX, and while I've since retired the mount, the little Esprit is here to stay.

Okay, fine. Here is my new SkyWatcher Esprit 80 ED APO, being used for the first time "in anger", sans fiilter wheel, just trying to catch a few photons (from the Leo Trio) after the weeks of rain its purchase brought on.

Okay, this isn't my "first of" ... it's my third, and the first that is not M42.

This is NGC 869, one of the two clusters in the Perseus Double Cluster. From 30 0.8 second exposures, 2x2 binned and 30 darks: no flats, somewhat obviously from the vignetting. Scope is an unguided, completely manual 6" reflector, hence the very short exposures and small size. Camera is Orion G3 monochrome, stacked and (mostly) processed with Nebulosity.

I know what I need to do next: motors on the mount for basic tracking, learn how to drift align, and work on focus. Oh, and get some flats. Still, as crude as this and my others are, I'm happy to have them, as they are at least fairly representative of what I can see with my own eye. Have had a lot of fun learning to get this far.

-- Joel.