Starter Astro-imaging rig. What to pull the trigger on

[Webby-962]

I'm just coming back to astronomy after an 8 year break. Things have moved on a lot since then, and I'm excited to get into the photography side of things again. Hopefully the days of butchering an old webcam to fit it to my old skywatcher 130 telescope are over! Especially with guiding mounts and tracking software!

So, I've been researching a starter rig to get me back into it. My budget is about £3.5k. I want to be able to image from my back garden, but also nip up the road to a nearby dark site if I need to.

I'm sure the hobby will grow, so this is a set up to start on, but also will see me into other areas.

I'm after a setup for DSO at this point in time.

I'm not sure if the EF is needed, and the camera choice is daunting, so advice welcome. Back in the day I was using a webcam and a DSLR.

Not use if it is best to start with colour or mono and filters (or if that is do-able in my budget) or cooled (I'm in the UK if that matters). I'm happy to stick to the ZWO ecosystem, so a ZWO camera is ok.

I was thinking:

Telescope        William Optics v2-U RedCat 51

Tracking Mount           Skywatcher Star Adventurer GTi            

Guide scope    William Optics 50mm Slide-base Uniguide scope

Guide camera ZWO ASI120MM-MINI

Camera controlers      ZWO ASIAIR Plus 32GB

Mount ProAstroGear Black-CAT Mount

Focuser?          ZWO Electronic Automatic Focuser

Camera??

I know there will. be loads of options, but any pros and cons with any recommendations most welcome.

Cheers

Edited November 12, 2023 by Cornelius Varley
Text colour removed

[Elp]

Are you purely going to do AP as I was going to suggest a WO zenithstar or GT scope. The Starfield 102 is also decent though I haven't tried imaging with it yet but you'd have to up your mount (forgot you wanted it small, a 100mm is no where near as portable as a 50-80mm refractor). A triplet will be better but the budget will have to go up. Also depending on your future plans maybe get something like a hem15 like I did (or an AM3), medium class payload capacity but tiny in size but you'd have to redistribute you budget. You don't really need an EAF, the focusing routine within the asiair is very good for manual focusing, if you don't need the super fast processing power (plate solving is faster on the plus compared to the mini for example) the asiair mini is also fine.

Camera, well how wide do you want to image? The 533 is popular if you can get over the square sensor, although the sensor size of the 294 is appealing I'd avoid it as it has calibration issues (red or green random swirl patterns left on image, some people don't experience it, but if you do it limits how hard you can post process the data). The 183 is my workhorse but those small pixels take a while to saturate. You don't even really need cooled either if you're willing to put in the time pre or post imaging to take your darks. The 2600 I think is the one many would like to get if budget allowed.

You'd also need to decide if you want to image colour or mono and include provision for a filter drawer and some filters. Quad/tri/dual band OSC filters work great in limiting LP and bringing out your emission targets, you can even post process the OSC data to look like the Hubble pallet as if you did it in mono. I prefer my mono data as it's ever so slightly sharper and you have more control over it rather than splitting channels on OSC data, and you can dedicate specific time to capture one bandpass, but at the cost of spreading the total project time over a number of sessions.

Edited November 12, 2023 by Elp