Advice: Mount for wide field astrophotography?

[garypearson]

Looking for some advice please.

I would like to have a go a wide field, long exposure astrophotography-- having seen some very nice images in the forums.

I know I need a good mount. Ideally one which could align itself to polar north to reduce set-up time. I would want it to track accurately enough for several minutes exposure with, say, up to a 200 mm lens on a 1.5x crop DSLR, so that when printing at A4 size everything is sharp.

Have no desire to get another telescope, but without can one attach a camera to the mount?

Cost <= £300.

Gary.

[barkis]

Have you thought about the Astrotrac Gary. They seem a very capable device well suited as a camera drive, and very accurate. I think Beyondvision (Kevin) has one of these, and he produced some superb widefield images a Kelling I believe. If you look in the Widefield Imaging section you should find them.

Here is a link to one of them.

Ron.

http://stargazerslounge.com/index.php/topic,32937.0.html

[Doc]

Make yourself a Barndoor device.

[garypearson]

Ron,

I had a look at the website and read a couple of reviews; it looks like a good product. I have a decent tripod, would probably need to buy their tripod head. Issue is the price is out of my range at the mo.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Gary.

Have you thought about the Astrotrac Gary. They seem a very capable device well suited as a camera drive, and very accurate. I think Beyondvision (Kevin) has one of these, and he produced some superb widefield images a Kelling I believe. If you look in the Widefield Imaging section you should find them.

Here is a link to one of them.

Ron.

http://stargazerslounge.com/index.php/topic,32937.0.html

[garypearson]

I already have a cheap eq-2 mount with a r.a. motor drive on. I'm not sure if a barn door device would give any better performance that this, but I'm a bit of a novice so I would have to defer to your better judgment.

I got very disappointing results with the combination, exposures of several tens of seconds would show star steaks even though I tried my best to polar align using the Kochabs clock technique. I also found positioning the camera to its target not as easy as I'd like when attached to the telescope using its very basic camera mount (basically just a screw on the telescope rings with a plastic baseplate)

Hence, thinking of getting some gear specifically designed for cameras.

Gary.

Make yourself a Barndoor device.