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(To Be Updated See The Learning Curve)
I bought my first telescope, an ETX 90 RA, with a tax rebate in late 1999. I was living in a mid floor apartment in Brooklyn at the time so pointing it out the window was the best I could manage for the first few months. When we moved back to the UK from the US I bought my first serious scope, a Mead LX10. This was a great investment and served me with hours of fun from the back garden and out at dark sites. I spent two years with this scope learning the basics of star hopping and imaging. When our daughter arrived the time for driving out to the country and spending hours taking film exposures suddenly dissapeared so I saved up my pennies and bought a SX MX7C single shot colour camera. The first six months with this were painful and I wasted hours trying to capture my first good images but with a great deal of help from the SX Yahoo group I finally began to make progress. I had the guys at Starlight Xpress make me up a relay box that allowed the LX10 to use their STAR 2000 system. This was a godsend as up until then I had be manually guiding hours after hours of exposure. After about 18 months I think I finally knew what I was supposed to be doing and I sold the LX10 and bought my current set up which of course will never need to be upgraded! I also swapped the chip in my camera for the 716 mono and bought a set of Astronomik filters.
I made good progress with this set up but I then relised I needed more exposure data to overcome my light polluted skies. The simple answer was to switch to a dedicated guide camera and move away from self guide. I bought an ST4 and a 300 mm camera lens as my guiding set up. Then I learnt all about flexure and drift. So I gave up on the cheap and cheerful guide scope and went for a Borg 45ED mounted in a set of Losmandy 3 point rings. With the ST4 the 300 mm focal length of the 45ED seems to work fine at ~ 2 arc seconds per pixel on the imaging camera. I also bought a Borg 76ED for wide field work and gave my Nikon lens back to its owner.
The last step has been to buy an SXV H9 which I am delighted with.
The set up is:
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Starlight Xpress SXV H9 CCD
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APM 160 mm f5.5 MakNewt
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Takahshi EM 200 Temma 2 Mount
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Astronomik filters
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Astronomik manual filter holder
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Photoshop 5.5
The switch to tri-colour imaging and the new equipment has dramatically improved the quality and efficiency of my imaging. I now understand why you should buy the best gear available. A quality mount and quality optics make such a huge difference.
The Mak Newt
Borg 76ED set up
Guide scope set up: 45ED with Tru Tech Flip mirror and software bisque par focal eye piece (turns out to be not so par focal in my experience). I use the guider for as a finder as well. The Dew zappers are from Telescope House. When outside the Milky Way I usually have to adjust the pinting to centre a star on the ST4. When I'm finished imaging I simply re align the scope and 45ED so I don't have to mess around next time out.
The last image is my Poor Mans Epsilon E160 two threads taped across the objective of the 76ED to provide the spikes.
