Before Electronic Gadgets How?

[Coco]

Hi

before all these electronic gadgets that keep the object in the centre how did you astro photographers manage?.

I have a modest (cheap) 90 mm Meade with autostar but there's no way I could mount my 40D via T-Mount without probably straining/stripping all the plastic gears inside? I'm presuming it has plastic gears as the whole unit feels very cheap. :oops:

The reason why I'm asking is that in the future I'm going to want to take photos as I'm a keen photographer and some of the autostar more powerful options are really going to blow my budget of around £500.00 .

Thanks

Guy

[Jamie]

In the beginning when i was doing film photography i used to use a double crosshair reticle eyepiece for guiding.

Using the method of being bent over the eyepiece for hours at a time with the hand controller to make any adjustments.

You manually keep the guide star in the little square in the middle of the reticle by making adjustments left,right,up and down with the hand controler.

This was the only way available to guide at one time (for me anyway)

I am sure there are those that have imaged before reticle eyepieces were available but i have no idea of the methods they used to track the stars......

[Coco]

In the beginning when i was doing film photography i used to use a double crosshair reticle eyepiece for guiding.

Using the method of being bent over the eyepiece for hours at a time with the hand controller to make any adjustments.

You manually keep the guide star in the little square in the middle of the reticle by making adjustments left,right,up and down with the hand controler.

Thanks ... I was afraid you were going to say that :mrgreen:

.

[Tohrazer]

so theoretically it IS possible to take photos with a dobsonian, assuming you have a recticle?

[kniclander]

so theoretically it IS possible to take photos with a dobsonian, assuming you have a recticle?

ooh er :oops: - I think you need a reticle not a recticle

[SteveL]

so theoretically it IS possible to take photos with a dobsonian, assuming you have a recticle?

A dobsonian is an AltAz mount, so even with manual guiding, you would still not be able to do long exposure images with it without running into field rotation issues.

[cygnusx1]

What about before the electronic age, pre 1950s, weren't they still producing some fine long f/l images at the major observatories??

[Astroscot2]

Kevin, same method as Jamie mentioned, they sat up at the prime focus of these large scopes and manually guided.

[Astro_Baby]

But you'd need an EQ mount - when I restarted someone told me it was impossible to do photography with manual guiding ( or at least almost impossible ). I was going to have a bash at proving them wrong and take some pics with some 35mm film the old fashioned way but then I decided I couldn't be bothered

Thats how it used to be done years ago and it was a real plava with 35mm film cos you needed special films and special processing and you could go through all the aggro of manually guiding for 15 minutes, messing about processing the film and then voila - you had nothing cos something had failed. It was great fun 8)

I never did any astro-photography years ago cos the costs for a scope good enough to make it worthwhile were prohibitive but I used to have my own darkroom and messed about a lot with film processing and a right old game it was as well especially with some of the more exotic film types.