Hi All,
Very new to the forum and have been looking up with purpose for about 18 months now. My son's birthday was the catalyst and we started him with a Skywatcher 200p Dobsonian and we managed Jupiter, Saturn and Venus on it but the push-to was less than ideal for any imaging. Within 12 months I was soon prompted by my nearest and dearest to consider AP and hence plumped for a (third-hand) NEQ6 Pro mount.
We upgraded it with the Rowan Astronomy belt kit and re-greased the bearings and fine-tuned the backlash to improve goto slews and tracking. It's now near silent on slews rather than the coffee grinder noises it was making previously.
I have the EQ6 rail kit yet to be installed but given the next 12 nights appear to be cloud-filled, I may tackle that little job on the weekend.
I had my first proper imaging session yesterday when, wonder of wonders, we had a cloudless night and the light pollution from nearby was manageable. I'm in a Bortle 6 zone, north facing with large trees in nearly all directions so backyard imaging is limited to east/west axis and not far from the the zenith.
Targeted M31 and when the raw images came in, I wasn't convinced I'd actually captured much of anything and feared my goto was off... but after a few hours playing in various software, have arrived at something I was happy to upload to Astrobin.
I think it is safe to say I'm hooked.
Very new to the forum and have been looking up with purpose for about 18 months now. My son's birthday was the catalyst and we started him with a Skywatcher 200p Dobsonian and we managed Jupiter, Saturn and Venus on it but the push-to was less than ideal for any imaging. Within 12 months I was soon prompted by my nearest and dearest to consider AP and hence plumped for a (third-hand) NEQ6 Pro mount.
We upgraded it with the Rowan Astronomy belt kit and re-greased the bearings and fine-tuned the backlash to improve goto slews and tracking. It's now near silent on slews rather than the coffee grinder noises it was making previously.
I have the EQ6 rail kit yet to be installed but given the next 12 nights appear to be cloud-filled, I may tackle that little job on the weekend.
I had my first proper imaging session yesterday when, wonder of wonders, we had a cloudless night and the light pollution from nearby was manageable. I'm in a Bortle 6 zone, north facing with large trees in nearly all directions so backyard imaging is limited to east/west axis and not far from the the zenith.
Targeted M31 and when the raw images came in, I wasn't convinced I'd actually captured much of anything and feared my goto was off... but after a few hours playing in various software, have arrived at something I was happy to upload to Astrobin.
I think it is safe to say I'm hooked.
