Celeastron 200GT Automation.

[mlwood37]

Im working on spending as little as possible and using the tool and hardware i all ready own. I have a Budget of £300/£400 including the telescope (not including PCs and Camera)

So far I have made all my own cables and Automated the Goto Mount and Camera. Im planning next on automating the Zoom eye peace and Focus then creating a star tracker so i can do long exposure on some nebula.

My set up consists of the following as pictured below -

Celestron 200GT Telescope Cost £180

Cannon 1100D Camra

Dell Touch screen Flip lap top (duel core @ 1.66 GHz)

USB 10 Meter Extender cable Cost £5.99

Home made Serial to RJ9 10 meter cable (to handset) Cost £2.20 to make

Home made GPS attached to Laptop that feeds into to handset Cost £6.40 to make

Zoom Eye peace 7 to 21x Cost £25

T adapters Cost £8.50

Dumb bell weights Cost £0.00

Next im going to automate the Focus and then im going to automate the zoom eye peace how ever this will take some working out. Ive tried using a blue tooth serial adapter how ever it never worked with the hand set and kept losing it connection which was quite frustrating so im going to stick with wire for now.

Once all that is done ill then build a star tracker with a trust HD web cam that only cost £9.99 Pic below of how ive all ready adapted it ready to work on a eye peace. Again still with in my budget.

Ill keep this little log in progress how i go but i don't see no reason why i cannot take some good photos and keep warm for a fraction of the cost of some of these more expensive set ups.

[mlwood37]

ops its a 102GT not 200 hahaha

[mlwood37]

Oky more work done on the 200GT celestron

1) Every thing is running on 12V

2) Cannon 1100D Modded

3) Celestron Mount running on Blue tooth connected to android mobile phone

4) Star tracking running on web cam connected via ascom drivers and Guide master

5) Backyard EOS running the cannon DSLR

6) Modded battery on cannon to run at 12v

Whole set up has cost less than £320 and fully working now just need a clear night

[mlwood37]

pic to show it all set up in messy kitchen.

[rowan46]

How are you going to sort out the field rotation on your long exposures? it is an alt /az mount.

[mlwood37]

aint got a clue what your talking about all i know is it works. the finer details i leave up to every one else to discuss ...

[mlwood37]

My first test pic last night on afocal

Cannon EOS 1100d

Exposure : 1/100

Iso : 100

Focal Length : 1000mm

Unedited photo : extremely windy night.

[Helen]

That's a good start :-)

On the point about field rotation, just take shortish exposures and then stack using DeepSkyStacker. You'll lose some of the outside of the frame because of the slightly different orientation of the camera because of field rotation, but the centre will be fine.

Your bluetooth to android experiment has given me inspiration for linking my Nexus 7 - so thanks for that!!

Helen

[mlwood37]

Hi there thank you for the explanation. Ill have to look into this next time i get a not so windy night. It was a bit of dog the wind and rain effort last night with itchy fingers to try and get some shorts taken.

For the Bluetooth set up is quite easy.

I used this adapter -> http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261134863208?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649

to get the remote connection how ever in a effort "to see if it could be done cheaper" I used this smaller cheaper Bluetooth adapter connected to the celestron mount (wireing is not that hard and i dropped the voltage to it using a resistor from the 5v line on the power tank.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/270953956243?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649. It worked perfectly fine with Android Sky Safari Pro and at £6.98 is a bargain in comparison to over rated and over priced named branded stuff. How ever our range is reduced to about 25 meters. With the more expensive B232BE I managed to get 80 meters plus distance (including going though wall).

The system all so worked fine on a Dell PC (and my water cooled PC) using a £1.00 Bluetooth USB adapter how ever again distance is reduced. Id suggest getting a Good 100M USB to Bluetooth adapter. Don't be tempted to go for 2 x "B232BE" as it doesn't work due to the coms communication hand shake aspect of it. All so when wiring up the handset pins 7 and 8 (DB9 to RJ45 adapter) must be connected together to fake a receive signal .

[mlwood37]

I must post as well how i have got my EOS 1100D on 9V to run from the power tank as ive seen loads of people paying a small fortune to do this and having there eye balls ripped out. As you know running Mains to DSLR is not a good idea esp in the rain and getting a 12V to DSLR for a 1100D is dammed expensive how ever i solved this problem really easily.

I bought a cheap Main adapter kit from the bay -> http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ACK-E10-AC-Power-Adapter-DC-Coupler-Kit-For-CANON-EOS-1100D-Kiss-X50-Rebel-T3-/251150496700?pt=UK_Camera_Chargers_Docks&hash=item3a79bc73bc&_uhb=1

Chopped off the mains power converter and thew it in the bin.

Bought a DC/DC 12v to 7.5V step down kit -> http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/260828019477?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649

And replaced the mains power with this and now i can connect my EOS 1100D on a 12v direct from the power tank. This gives me hours apon hours of time to mess on with out the need of any battery's. Perfect for them long nights and the whole kit came to £15.00 which is much better than the £75.00 some people are charging.

I know expert at astrophotography but im saving a fortune learning how to do it all my self.

[mlwood37]

I mean i am no expert.

[mlwood37]

Oky another mod to my scope. "what do you mean that focuser wont fit !!!!!!"

Celesron 102GT with focuser fitted.

I will paint the cut marks on the scope later on.

All i have to do now is fit one to the star tracker and i think we will be finished.

[mlwood37]

a few more updates to the scope just need so clear skys now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ArJPWVlrgOI

[sgazer]

very nice to see this set up as my very first scope from Amazon was the Celestron SLT with the 60mm frac, very similar to what you have (and was a very rare 100pounds!). I initially didn't get on with it and went through many setups, dobs, eq guided etc etc, but now I'm actually back to the SLT with a camera!

I've done a lot of work with the little SLT, including tightening up the tripod and making tracking slicker. They struggle to track well though, even with a 250mm lens on a Canon 450d, it was difficult to get 30-60s exposures. So with your scope (600mm focal length and f10?) I think long exposure will be very difficult and the slow scope will require very long exposures for DSOs. With the SLR on the end, you might need to slide it way forward to balance it. Field rotation is where the outer stars will rotate around the edge of the frame, no matter how good the tracking due to it being an ALT/AZ mount, not equatorial. The effect will depend on exposure length and where it's pointing in the sky.

The weight limit of the SLT is quite low so I think your third pic will be pushing it. I currently use a 600mm compact camera on the SLT (only 400grams) and it's still not good. I've converted the mount to Equatorial (so it can be aligned with the earths axis) and installed the Nexstar SE firmware (which has equatorial alignment), this means no field rotation and it only needs to track in one axis (RA). I'm also trying to autoguide it (with a samsung CCD camera and Canon 250mm lens), but there's a lot of slop in the gears, but had some success, just need to improve the polar alignment, which is difficult down under as there's no pole star, do have to do drift alignment.

For planetary, the scope with the webcam on the end will be fine on the SLT as the exposures are very short so tracking is not critical.

Anyway, if you need any info on the SLT, let me know.

[Helen]

The bluetooth adapter arrived this morning and after a bit of playing (and muttering!!) I've managed to get skysafari on my nexus 7 to control my synscan scope

Thanks for the heads up!

Helen

[mlwood37]

Excelent Helen. see you dont need to spend a fortune

My Next Big mod after my handset decided to die and after spending way to long for celestron to replace it is this ->

changed out the 700TVL Effio-E Cam and fitted it.

Stages of the new build

1) Box from some electrical store.

2) Drilled Holes and fitted Camera Bord

3) Added Camera to Telescope adapter

4) Completed

This camera cost £15.00 inc Dleviery + £1.99 for the box + £9.99 for the adapter = £26.98

The camera specs are below

TV System - NTSC/PAL

Image Sensor - 1/3 inch Sony HAD CCD

Effective Pixels - 976(H)x494(V)

Scanning System - 2:1 Interlace

Scanning Frequency - 15.734KHz(H),59.94Hz(V)

Sync. System - Internal

Horizontal Resolution - 700TV Lines

Min. Illumination - 0.001Lux

S/N Ratio - 50dB (AGC OFF)

White Balance - ATW / MANUAL / PUSH

AGC- ON OFF

IRIS - Electrical Auto IRIS

Shutter Speed - 1/50~1/100,000 sec.

Video Output - 1.0Lx0.2Vp-p, 75ohm(BNC Connector)

BLC - ON

Power Supply - DC12V 0.5A

Operating Temp - -10℃ to 40℃

Dimension - 38mm X 38mm

Lens - not used

OSD Language English

When i get some time ill take some pics of it in action.

This is camera is for guiding only but im looking for a much better mount now over the celstron one. Im not going to buy a celestron one though and am thinking about getting a ST5 or ST6 mount .