Has anyone tried taking Astrophotos with a vixen Porta 2 Tripod?

[yeletah]

Has anyone tried taking photos with a vixen Porta 2 tripod?

The idea is to use my celestron travel scope as a guiding scope.

(can i do it manually by looking through ther guiding scope, for a minute?)

My idea is to buy a vixen motor set to drive the slow motion controls.

my question is,

rather than just tracking, will this motor set allow itself to be driven by autoguiding software?

has anyone tried it?

telescope ED80 pro, camera EOS 1100D

any advice would be great

[rowan46]

it will not work for long exposures as its an alt az mount if you want to do long exposure you need an eq mount you can get pics out of an alt az mount but that needs short exposure about 20-30 secs and then stacked.there's only one guided altaz mount I have heard of never actually seen one though and its very expensive.

[TrickySpot]

If you did manage to get this to work, you'll get very "interesting" photos. It'll look like your target was in a tumble dryer :-) Alt-Az mounts don't compensate for the fact that objects are rotating relative to the observer as time goes by. So no, don't try and go down this route!

Cheers,

Martin

[yeletah]

Thanks

[rwilkey]

My opinion is that the Porta 2 will be too unstable for any photography, it's great for viewing but not photography. Most here recommend an EQ6 or similar.

[jgs001]

If it's driven you can certainly use it... as has been said, long exposures are tricky... but you're not limited to 20 - 30 seconds... The exposure time is limited by where in the sky you're trying to image. If you're low in the east or west, then 2 minutes is possible... as you get higher in the sky, or further North or South, then that exposure time comes down to around 20 to 30 seconds. If you're prepared to get a lot of exposures.. you can get reasonable results. If the mount drives are not great or the tripod is too wobbly, then getting those exposure lengths becomes more difficult. When I used a NexStar SLT mount with an ST80, I was able to get 2 minute exposures on M31, but lost 50% due to the drive train. When I shot 150 odd 40 second exposures of M52 and stacked them, I was very surprised to see the bubble nebula appear with my unmodded SLR. Either way, the practice is all good, and it helps get your head around the difficulties involved.

I do agree that a decent weight EQ mount (HEQ5) is ideal, you can achieve images with a lot less.

If you want, I can try and find the images I took with my SLT mount.

[yeletah]

Thanks for the posts, what is the longest exposure before star trails with no tracking? can I manually track for 60 seconds?

[jgs001]

Without tracking, that will depend on the focal length... In theory, you ought to be able to manually track for 60 seconds, but it might be tricky. If you're seriously looking at manually tracking, then I'd have a look for a barn door mount, I think they should be easy to make and quite simple. Looks like it should do an easy job on widefield imaging with camera lenses. I really don't think I'd want to try manually tracking at 600mm.

[yeletah]

The ED80 has flocal length of 600mm? on a vixen porta 2 tripod, i was hoping to get 10 - 20s? with no tracking

and then

I would like to look through an attached celestron 70mm and manually guide using the slow motion controls for 20s

[jgs001]

With no tracking, I think you'll be lucky to get 1 second... With a 50mm lens, the exposure time, without trailing, is between 8 and 12 seconds. At 18mm, you can just about get away with 25 - 30 seconds.

The only thing I can suggest with manually guiding... try it and see. I can never remember the mans name, but one of the well known (except for my poor memory) astronomers working on Hubble's work used to manually guide one of the real big scopes in America (although it was tracked). You're going to have to track in two different dimensions at the same time...

[yeletah]

Thanks for the info, I'm suprised not more people have tried to guide manually using a 70mm

refractor attached to the 80mm telescope, on an alt-azimuth.

maybe the slow motion controls on the vixen porta 2 still cause vibraton.

I'll try it and see how the images turn out!