Equipment

My "Tak Stack" from back in the day! And cows.

At this time I decided to get more serious about astrophotography and picked up a 16 inch f4.5 Newtonian with equatorial mount and I haven't stopped since! The film days were wonderfully simple compared to the more rigid requirements of digital imaging and so the equipment has evolved much over the years. Most of what I currently use is off the shelf, very little is home-made any more. Quite a contrast to the 60's and 70's when much of what people used was home made. There is now so much commercially available equipment that the combinations are virtually endless. There are now visual and photographic options available in almost any price bracket - you just need to decide how much you are willing to throw at this hobby! Be warned that once you start into this hobby, you will never be satisfied with what you have! There is always something bigger and better just around the corner.

I do not have a back-yard so all of my imaging sessions have been in the field. It is great to be out under the dark Alberta skies but the 200 foot trip to and from the car with all the equipment gets harder as I get older! I am constantly changing my arsenal of equipment, here is the current lineup. (April 2021)

• Astro-Physics 900QMD. An older, non-goto German equatorial mount of exceptional rigidity and accuracy. I use this more with the larger equipment or for imaging systems of longer focal length. A superb piece but heavy to carry into the field. Currently it is used on my Losmandy tripod or when I have the energy - the Monolith pier. My 900 is equipped with the optional polar alignment scope. A must have piece of equipment! Polar alignment can be achieved in just a few minutes, though I still confirm alignment accuracy by following up with a drift alignment. Tweaks are usually minor if required at all.
  
  

  900QMD pictured with Vixen VC200L Scope

  
  
• Losmandy G-11. (SOLD) Stepper motor version, non-goto. An excellent, lightweight and compact system! I used this when portability was important or when I didn't have the energy to drag the AP900 to the car. A great match for smaller refractors in the 4" range such as my FSQ-106. Due to the coarse step interval of the motors (1/2 arc second per step) this mount had proven to be a problem with long focal lengths where this 1/2 arc second step "drift" could cause guiding problems! If upgraded to the continuous drive DC servo motors, this problem would vanish. This wasn't a problem with focal lengths under 600mm. Despite this, it is a great mount and beautifully made in the USA.
  
  

  Losmandy G-11 pictured with the Vixen VC200L

  
  
• Sky-Watcher EQM-35 Pro This is my latest mount acquisition in 2021, purchased with the goal of being able to take photos from home. One of the problems with taking pictures from the city is that light pollution masks all the stars you need to find anything! With a go-to mount, once it is aligned with the few stars that you can see, it can move under its own power to any target you wish. This really simplifies things! The other problem is of course light pollution masking your targets. However, there are "narrow band" filters on the market which block everything except the light from some types of nebula so it is possible to shoot those from in town. Exposure times are long but for small telescopes and telephoto lenses, the accuracy of the drive on this relatively inexpensive mount is up to the task.
  
  I look forward to being able to shoot some targets from the comfort of home! Alan Dyer's review of this mount is available here.
  
  

  Sky-Watcher EQM-35 Pro

  
  

• Astro-Physics AP130EDT My latest imaging system! I acquired this beauty in January 2011 from a great guy in Vancouver. This is the less common f8.35 version of the scope made in 2002. The longer focal length gives about the best resolution in images that can be achieved with typical seeing conditions around Calgary. Visually and photographically this system is stunning! Visual first light showed Jupiter's moons as different sizes.
  
  

  Astro-Physics AP130EDT pictured with 900QMD and Monolith pier

  
  
• Takahashi FSQ-106 - my first refractor imaging system. This quadruplet fluorite system is an amazing little rig! Much heavier than it looks, it boasts a 4" focuser for heavy camera loads and a flat photographic field. It also has a "fast" focal ratio of F5 giving shorter exposure times than my other scopes. Razor sharp images both on images and visually. Equipped with Robofocus, acquired spring of 2005. This was my primary imaging system until the acquisition of the Astro-Physics 130EDT.
  
  

  Takahashi FSQ on G-11 Mount

• TMB 175 - the crown jewel in my collection! (SOLD) A superb triplet 7" f8 refractor equipped with a 3.5" FeatherTouch focuser system. It produces excellent images and visually is a treat with its high contrast, colour free images. The drawbacks are its large size and weight approaching the limits of my 900QMD mount. I get a good workout lugging it to and from the car though! Due to its physical properties, it only gets out when I set up for several days at a time such as at a star party. Equipped with the FeatherTouch digital focusing system. Acquired summer 2008.
  

  "The Big one" dwarfing the imager!

• Takahashi FS-60C - Only the size of a finder scope but this fluorite doublet has a lot of punch when coupled to the field flattener/compressor! As expected from Takahashi, the optics are superb and mechanically it is a very solid unit. Excellent wide-field imaging system with fast optics at 264mm, F4.4. Equipped with RoboFocus, acquired fall of 2007. Also doubles as a guidescope with the ST4 for the STF-8300 camera.
  
  

  "The Little One" - my smallest imaging scope.

  
  
  
• Astro-Tech 72ED - Bigger than the FS-60C above, I originally bought this as a visual scope to take with me to South Africa in 2012. It has languished since until my purchase of the EQM-35 mount. In 2021 I picked up the flattener/compressor for this scope and plan to image with it from home using the go-to mount. Possibly in the field under dark skies as well for colour imaging. All depends on how good the colour correction is with the flattener so this one is a work in progress! But it should be a nice system with a focal length of 344mm f4.7.
  
  

  The Astro-Tech AT72ED.

  
  
  
• Vixen VC-200L - An older "white tube" version of this scope. I purchased it back in 2004 when I was shooting film cameras. The lack of a corrector plate, external focuser and built-in flattener made it a better imaging system to me than any of the commercial Schmidt-Cassegrains on the market. It generally works very well but the thick spider vanes add more diffraction to the image than I like. The F9 focal ratio also means that exposure times are very long. The longer focal length of 1800mm means that you need a really solid mount to effectively use this scope! I don't use this scope much but it has its place in my line-up. It works nicely with fast cameras such as the SBIG ST-10XME and under skies of steady seeing such as at Mt. Kobau.
  
  

  The Vixen, on the 900QMD mount.

  
  
  
• Canon telephoto lens - I originally bought this lens to shoot wildlife on my first trip to South Africa in 2010. It is one of the Canon "Pro" lenses, a 70-200 f2.8 telephoto. For a modest fee, SBIG made available a Canon lens adapter for their STF-8300 camera so I picked one up. The primary purpose of this lens was to replace the Schmidt camera of the film days, a high resolution medium field imager. As I write this it hasn't seen first light yet but I am looking forward to what it can do!
  
  

  The Canon 70-200 attached to the STF-8300 camera

Wow, this has been a long list! In 1987 I acquired an Olympus OM1 and lenses as my primary astro camera. Around that time I also bought a Canda Technologies cold camera. This device used dry ice to cool the film to about -40C to improve film performance and colour balance. There are a few examples of how well this device worked scattered throughout the photo collections on this website. Most film images were taken with the OM1 or the later addition - the OM2. In 1992 I added an 8" f1.5 Schmidt camera to the collection. This photographic telescope bent film into a convex shape and brought wide field, high resolution images to the fold. With this camera I used primarily Kodak hypersensitized Tech Pan 2415 film. This camera filled the gap between camera lenses and prime focus with telescopes nicely. There are image examples scattered throughout the photo galleries on this web site. With a focal ratio of f1.5 this camera was incredibly fast!

• ST-4 (sold)

  I bought this camera in 1995 from my doctor, Dr. Fegler of Bragg Creek, Alberta. This unit was built primarily as an auto-guider and was based on the tiny TC-211 CCD sensor from Texas Instruments. As of May 2012 I still own this camera. It wasn't all that great as an imaging camera though I did get a few images from it.

• ST237 (sold)

  In March 2002 I started down the dark side with the purchase of my first CCD camera. From SBIG in California, the ST237 was my first stab at digital. The camera wasn't huge at 640 x 480 pixels but it was affordable. It showed me that a: my equipment wasn't good enough and b: you can't guide accurately enough manually for digital! Hence another bout of equipment upgrades from the DS16 mount purchased 1986 starting, with the Losmandy G-11.

• ST-8 (sold)

  The ST237 I eventually added a colour filter wheel to in order to take colour images but in addition to the small pixel count, the camera sensor was rather noisy. My first upgrade was made possible by an offer from Brady Johnson who had an excess of ST-8 cameras and a need for an ST237 as a guider. So began my first auto-guiding camera from SBIG. The guidechip was only the tiny ST4 TC211 chip but let me guide so much more accurately than by hand. Plus, there was no flexure caused by using a separate guide telescope. The CCD wasn't very efficient in the blue and image transfer was very slow via the parallel port on a laptop but it got the job done with a whopping 1500 x 1000 pixels. I was happy with this camera until Jim Janusz posted an ad on Astromart...

• ST-8XME (sold)

  Woo-hoo! This was it! a serious CCD astro camera with enhanced blue sensitivity and (ironically) an ST-237 chip for guiding. I used this camera for several years and was very happy with its performance. You will find many images from this camera in the galleries. It was replaced when I got wind of Stuart Heggie selling his ST-10XME.

• ST-10XME

  A much bigger sensor at 2000 x 1500 pixels, how could I go wrong? This camera is stunning. the sensor is amazingly quiet and as my first non-blooming gate camera, incredibly sensitive. Approaching 98% quantum efficiency, this is one of the more sensitive sensors from Kodak. I still own this camera and have added almost every available accessory to it including the 10 position filter holder. One day I will venture into narrow-band imaging with this camera. However, the blooming of this camera means that some targets are simply not easy to shoot! For example, shooting the Orion Nebula meant that I had to manually de-bloom 45 individual exposures, plus the exposure times were so short that I was unable to shoot long enough for good s/n ratio in the fainter parts of the nebula. And so I started my search for something to compliment the ST10. The big plus with this camera is that is has a 2nd CCD sensor - another ST237 - built in, used exclusively for guiding. This really simplifies setup!

• STF-8300M

  In November 2011, SBIG announced the MK. II version of their budget camera based on the 8.3 M-pixel Kodak sensor. This camera has small (5.4 micron) pixels with shallow wells making it a good match for my smaller scopes in addition to telephoto lenses. It was also anti-blooming making targets with bright stars in the field possible again. I ordered one with the 5 position filter wheel, leaving narrow band something for the ST-10XME to deal with. At this time, I have not been able to get a flexure-free guide scope working with any of my scopes, so I now use the dedicated SBIG off-axis guider for this camera. This limits the camera as I can't get it to fit in some scopes due to flattener spacing requirements but the St-10XME still works with these scopes for now. It was purchased primarily for wide to medium field imaging leaving the ST-10XME for long focal length work, so it still fits into the plans with the off-axis guider.

  

  The STF-8300M from SBIG

• SBIG ST-i

  Shortly after selling the ST-4 autoguider I realized that in order to use an off-axis guider with the new STF-8300M above, I still needed a guide camera! For this purpose I picked up the SBIG ST-i mono which fits nicely into the 1.25" tube on the off-axis guider. Not much more to say about this piece - it isn't for taking pictures but to allow the other cameras to do so.

  

  The ST-i from SBIG