Longer Exposures...

[rickstanners]

Hi all,

I have been thinking for a while about having a go at some longer exposure photography. To do this though, I am going to need to "Equatorialise" my mount (the 8se has an alt-az mount).

I have heard conflicting reports about how accurate the mount would be at tracking and I know that mine tends to wobble about a target. My uneducated guess would be that if I went down the autoguiding route (there is an autoguide port), I see no reason why the thing wouldn't be able to track accurately while being told exactly what to do by a computer!

Obviously, I would like to test out the performance before I go buying wedges etc. and then discovering that I need a new mount!

So, to the questions, both probably stupid and asked before!

Does anyone have any experience of longer exposure photography with the 6/8SE mount?

What would be the simplest and cheapest way (if there is one!) to "have a go" at autoguiding to see how the mount copes?

Thanks

Richard

[moondog]

Since the 6/8SE mount is alt-az you will need to put it on a wedge first to make it track in equatorial mode. In alt-az mode after 25 secs or so tracking you will get field rotation of the image, this will make the image blurred as it rotates on itself. Autoguiding will only work in equatorial mode.

In his book 'The NexStar User's Guide' Michael Swanson says that the 8SE is acceptable for astro photography if used with the Celestron wedge model 93499 and tripod model 93501.

Hope this helps

MD