This page: My Viewing Log My Equipment My Astrophotography Astronomy links: Astronomy Daily Hardware links: Celestron Telescopes Meade Telescopes Scope City Software links: K3's Astronomy Software Registax Image Processing Software Barko Software - GuideDog & More ASCOM Standards - Scope Control Drivers DSLR Focus - Digital Cam Control Astrosnap - Imaging & Guiding IRIS - free image processing Image Plus - image processing Groups, Clubs and Resources: Nexstarsite.com QCUIAG - Quick Cam Group Autostarsuite.net - Meade's LPI Meade Advanced Products Users Group Yahoo Digital Astrophotography Group Yahoo SCT Users Group Yahoo Canon 300D Astro Group Registax Tutorial Light Pollution Removal Tutorial Telescope Reviews AstronomyLinks.com Other People's Pages: Robert Gendler's Astroimaging - MUST SEE! Chris Hendren's Astrophotography Weasner's LXD55 Site Canon G2 Astrophotography Astronomy Related Weather: Edwards AFB Clear Sky Clock Current weather map Bryan & Tanya Duke's Homepage Email Bryan Since 21 Dec 06:

Email Bryan / Sign Our Guestbook / View Our Guestbook Telescope: My main telescope is a Celestron Advanced Series C8-SGT. It's an 8" diameter, 2000mm focal length Schmidt-Cassegrain with Celestron's XLT Starbright optics coatings. The scope is mounted on the Celeston Advanced Series CG-5 computerized "goto" mount and tripod. This mount has a hand controller that lets you select any one of more than 40,000 objects in the sky and it will point the telescope there automatically. The mount is a German Equatorial style mount very similar to the Vixen GP series. This type of mount moves the scope exactly how the stars move in the night sky which lets you take very long exposure photos of the night sky. My second scope is a Celestron 80mm ED apochromatic refractor. I use it for wide field viewing and as a guidescope. I use an ADM Mini-Dovetail System and 125mm rings to mount it to my C8. Eyepieces: I currently have only one eyepiece, a Celestron ELux Plossl 25mm. Looking through this eyepiece gives you an 81x power telescope. Different eyepieces can be used to vary the magnification of the telescope, but the 25mm is a very good size for this scope and many of the objects in the night sky. Cameras and adapters: I have several cameras I use for astrophotography. My primary cameras are a Meade Lunar Planetary Imager (LPI) and a Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel. I also have a Canon G2 digital camera and a Canon EOS A2 35mm camera. The LPI is basically a webcam designed to fit in a 1.25" eyepiece telescope mount. The LPI has a fairly cheap 640x480 pixel CMOS sensor, but is very good for taking photos of bright objects in the sky. The 300D is my primary astrophotography camera. It has a 6.3 megapixel sensor (3072 x 2048 pixels) I use the LPI primarily for autoguiding. Using the Celestron Radial Guider, I can mount my Canon 300D and the LPI at the same time. For autoguiding I plug the LPI into my laptop USB port and my telescope handset into another USB port through a USB to serial converter. I use GuideDog, a freeware program, to take care of the autoguiding. GuideDog automatically captures images from the LPI, analizes them and gives commands to my telescope to track a specific star for as long as you want. My limited results so far show GuideDog can keep my scope pointed within 3 arc-seconds of where I tell it to track. To explain this a little better, if you stand pointing your finger at north and turn completely around, you have pointed through 360 degrees. Each one of those 360 degrees is made up of 60 arc-minutes. Each one of those arc-minutes is made up of 60 arc-seconds. So, the 3 arc-seconds tracking I can get with GuideDog and the Meade LPI is equal to 1/1200 of a degree. That's not perfect, but 1/1200 of a second is pretty small! I also have a Scopetronix DSLR eyepiece projection adapter, but I have not used it yet to take any photos with my 300D.