Andy Steere's
MY TELESCOPE
Photo Page
Most of the photos featured on my astrophotography pages were taken using a Meade 10" Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope (SCT for short), model Premier 2120/50HSD. This is my telescope. To get some sense of scale, the small blue finderscope shown mounted on the 10" is the same diameter as a normal department-store refractor (a 60mm telescope).
These photographs were taken on March 16th, 1996, at the club's Wildhaven observatory, while I waited for the clouds to go away so I could get a shot at Comet Hyakutake. Dewing was bad, so I had the dewshields on both telescopes. This presents a very large target for the wind and the pine trees in the background offered me some shielding from the strong west breeze. Normally I also run a Orion Dew Zapper on the scopes... but I was battling time and didn't have enough left over to get it all rigged up.
I purchased this scope new in March of 1991, after much looking at my needs (all possible forms of astrophotography with some viewing, but with a fixed budget of under $3000). This worked out to be just 6 months before the introduction of the LX-200 series. If the optics had not been good... I would have dumped it and spent the money for an LX-200. However, the views through it surpassed my expectations. After much looking through other scopes, and after hearing it was decent from people who normally dislike these types of telescopes, I decided to keep it.
This telescope, combined with a Lumicon Giant Easy Guider and a piggyback bracket, served me well for several months. In October of 1992, I added an ST-4 CCD autoguider to help with long exposure guiding (longer than 45 minutes).
In October of 1992, I found a used TeleVue Genesis at a price I couldn't resist. This is a 4 inch (100mm) APO refractor with a focal ratio of f/5. It's 500mm focal length filled a void I had between my camera lenses and the 10" combined with the Lumicon focal reducer. To mount this beast (it weighs 11 pounds without the diagonal or rings) firmly to my SCT, I chose the Losmandy Secondary Mounting System. Very heavy duty! Since I needed to sling 10 pounds of counterweights on the bottom and I wanted some additional flexibility, I decided to go with TWO sets of the rather expensive mounting plates. One for the top of the scope, the other for the bottom.
Next came the 125mm rings for the Genesis and the Losmandy piggyback bracket (strong enough to lift the scope by). Any of these can ride on the top or the bottom rail. This feature came in handy while photographing Comet Hyakutake. The comet's location close to the north celestial pole, put the Genesis's normal mounting position (shown in the photo above) upside down and underneath the forks of the 10". All I had to do was swap the counterweights with the Genesis... and I had it up on top where it's easy to deal with.
The Meade required a number of accessories to function for astrophotography. Some of those are shown in the photos above. I ordered the Meade with the Super Wedge, which works ok, but added a set of the Celestron Vibration Pads to settle it out. That helped quite a bit. Also needed a Telrad, since I don't have a computer to find things for me.
During the first part of 1996, I had the privilege of taking a close look at an SBIG ST5 imaging CCD camera and the very nice Motorized Filterwheel and Flipmirror manufactured by Andy Homeyer
.
A very nice system that fits perfectly on my 10". I hope to get a couple images up here before I have to send the unit back. So far, the only shots I've taken are not good enough to show myself... much less anybody else. Don't let anyone kid you... ccd imaging is hard work.
Not quite finished with this section... check back soon.
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Last modified on 03/25/2001