Unguided astrophotography with CG5-GT

[starscy]

Is anyone using the Celestron CG5-GT for unguided astrophotography? What kind of performance should I expect from this mount?

[old_eyes]

I am sure there are much more experienced people around, but I have been using this mount with a DSLR and relatively short exposures (30secs). Absolutely rock solid, and results good enough for me at the moment.

You take a series of these exposures and some dark frames, feed it all into some software like Deep Sky Stacker (free). It subtracts the dark frames, aligns the pictures and adds them together. Then you mess around with the picture in whatever iomage processing software you like (GIMP is open-source and free) until you like the way it looks.

For me the mount has been the least of my worries in my early forays into imaging. My problems are with focusing :-(.

old_eyes

[adamsp123]

It is a very good solid mount and your major limiting factor will be the accuracy of your polar alignment, although periodic error won't help, my advice is to get autoguiding as soon as you can afford it.

[Deneb]

Look at my site, it's in my Signature, all the stuff I have done is unguided. You can get around 2mins unguided on that mount.

Actually if you some patience, there is nothing wrong with unguiding work, I was unguiding for a year before I decided to buy guiding gear & I will still continue to do some unguiding work it was a great pleasure imaging with a limited setup just to see what potential I could get out of my setup. This image of M31 was done without guiding.

Cheers

Nadeem

[old_eyes]

Look at my site, it's in my Signature, all the stuff I have done is unguided. You can get around 2mins unguided on that mount.

Actually if you some patience, there is nothing wrong with unguiding work, I was unguiding for a year before I decided to buy guiding gear & I will still continue to do some unguiding work it was a great pleasure imaging with a limited setup just to see what potential I could get out of my setup. This image of M31 was done without guiding.

Cheers

Nadeem

M31 image is great Nadeem. But 7 hours of 2 min exposures! 210 sub-frames - wow! They must have been taken over many sessions. I like the idea of gradually perfecting an image over time.

old_eyes