Motor Drives

[JKB]

Quick question to all in the know. Although new to this fascinating hobby I have become more interested in Astrophotography.

Is it worth me buying dual motors for my EQ3/2 or just the motor for RA and investing in a Polarscope for decent alignment?

FLO do RA for £79 and both for £91 but do I really need both? I will be using Canon 30D on Prime focus and SPC900 for DSO's.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[E621Keith]

If you can't upgrade your mount to a HEQ5, I'd go for the dual axis drive if you want to do photography. Touching the manual slow motion control is enough to induce visible shake on an image.

The dual axis drive will give you more stable motion control, in both axis. On the other hand, if you only intend to do visual, an RA drive is sufficient.

[malc-c]

Depends on the level of astro-photography you want to do. At one end of the scale you have the planetary webcam, or attaching a Digital camera to the scope, in which case having the scope polar aligned and driven in RA will suffice for taking images of the moon and brighter planets. At the other end of the scale you have two scopes, one to guide the main scope which has the camera attached. At this level, dual axis motors are required as small adjustments in both RA and DEC are required, either manually or via an autoguider which makes the corrections for you. At the top end of the scale the mount you have is not up to the job IMO. But for imaging at the low end dual axis drives on a EQ-3 would be very usable.

Personally, there are a few EQ-5 mounts available second hand as people have upgraded to HEQ5 or EQ-6's. You would be better off purchasing one of these and adding dual axis drives to that for your 150p which would, IMO also cater for adding a small additional scope for guide purpose at a later date.

[Capricorn]

Get a dual set of motors.

Makes no sense to drive the scope to an object with the motors in one direction. Then manually move it in the other.

Remember that to locate an object you will be bent over with your head will be looking through the finder and eyepiece while you manually twiddle a knob. It is just so much easier to do it all with a single handset on the end of a cable.

[AndyExton]

I have another question sort of related to this.

I have an EQ5 mount and wish to motorise the mount. Will adding dual drive axis allow me to connect to a laptop so I can use packages such as starry night / stellarium to slew to an object or if not, what other hardware do I require. Would I just be best off purchasing a goto upgrade? Are the skywatcher goto upgrades all the same....i.e. the same package will upgrade eq5, heq5 and eq6?

[Cornelius Varley]

I have another question sort of related to this.

I have an EQ5 mount and wish to motorise the mount. Will adding dual drive axis allow me to connect to a laptop so I can use packages such as starry night / stellarium to slew to an object or if not, what other hardware do I require. Would I just be best off purchasing a goto upgrade? Are the skywatcher goto upgrades all the same....i.e. the same package will upgrade eq5, heq5 and eq6?

To control your mount from a laptop you will need the EQ5 Synscan upgrade. Each of the Synscan upgrades are specifical to the mount ie the EQ5 upgrade is only suitable for the EQ5 and the HEQ5 upgrade is for the HEQ5 etc.

Peter

[AndyExton]

Thank you for the info Peter....that has helped me alot so I now know what I'm looking for.

Andy

[malc-c]

I'm no expert, but with the HEQ5 I'm sure you can drive the mount direct from a laptop with EQMOD without having to have the syntrac or sysnscan units.

On the EQ5 you do in deed have to have the synscan unit.