Equipment
TS Photoline 130/910 Triplet
May 2020, my last and for the first time new telescope arrived. Until than I had always bought second-hand telescopes. This beauty is the TS Photoline 130/910 f7 APO triplet telescope from Telescope Service . To use this telescope at f5.5, I have a 3 inch reducer x.79 from TS, it also flattens the image field for big sensors.
Skywatcher EQ6-Synscan Go-To Mount
I have an older model of the EQ6 , well know mount series of Skywatcher, bought it second hand in 2016. In June 2020 I've had it completely refurbished and modified with a Rowen belt system. It's running very smooth and quit now. It's having no problems with the current payload, about 13,5 kg.
On average I can run guiding with PHD2 at around 1.22" RMS, on good nights even below 1 arcsecond. The pixel scale of my setup is 1,07"/pixel, so I'm quite happy with this guiding performance. It gives me round stars, need no more.
I'm also using a surveillance-webcam to ... you guessed it, to survey.
EQ6-Wedge and Polemaster
I've modified/upgraded my EQ6 mount with a Vimech EQ6-wedge. Together with the QHY Polemaster this makes polar alignment much more easier. Instead of kneeling behind the polefinder and turning on the adjustment screws forward and backward, I can do the final tweaks of alignment looking at my laptop. One downside of this wedge is that you first have to unlock the altitude axes two bolts with an Allen key and re tighten it again after alignment is done. So you still need a tool and it's a bit getting used to it.
When using the EQ6-Wedge 'on the field', it appeared to always loose the altitude setting after transport. So each time I rolled out my entire setup on my terrace, the altitude had shifted quite a bit and I needed to fiddly each time with this. It's probably due to the heavy load, approximately 13,5 kg, that it shifted each time. So eventually I re-installed the old/original wedge for altitude setting and this doesn't shift at all, even when rolling the setup over my bumpy ground. Although the Vimech EQ6-Wedge is a very nice piece of engineering, I sold it because for me it wasn't performing as intended.
Seletek Armadillo Motorfocus
For focusing from my warm seat in my office, I've installed the Seletek Armadillo motorfocus unit. It takes even care of the focus thru the autofocus routine from N.I.N.A. (Nighttime Imaging 'N Astronomy). There's very little backlash and it can handle easily my entire image-train.
"ZWO Rotator"
In order to be fully automated, I'm also using an electronic rotator. I've had it custom made by a friend, by using a ZWO EAF as drive for the rotator. In this way I can frame and rotate the image chip to the 0,1° accurate.
ZWO ASI120MC and ZWO 60/280 Guidescope
For guiding with PHD2, I've installed the ZWO 60/280 guidescope with helical focuser. In the picture you see my planet camera ASI178MC, but actually I'm actively using the ASI120MC as my main guidecam.
ZWO ASI1600MM-cool
The photon-catcher of service is the ZWO ASI1600MM-cool, the previous model version 2, not the pro which is version 3. As I'm using a mono-camera, I've also an electronic filterwheel from ZWO with 8 slots. All slots are fitted with Astronomik 31mm unmounted filters in this order: L2, R, G, B, CLS, SII, Ha, OIII. The narrow band filters have 6nm bandwidth.
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For capturing and programming my sequence, I'm very fond of using N.I.N.A. Nighttime Imaging 'N Astronomy opensource software. It has a very intuitive user interface, it's highly customizable and for all, it's free.
Another must-have piece of opensource software is PHD2 Guiding. For exposure of subframes to 300", I absolutely need guiding. My mount isn't of the high-end professional quality (or price) so we've to compromise and use guiding. As mentioned together with my ZWO 60/280 guidescope and ASI120MC guidecamera, I'm using PHD2 guiding on-mount via the ASCOM-driver set.
For stacking my sub frames I use Astro Pixel Processor . This is a very user friendly way for doing this. The program has a lot of useful algorithms, but most of the time I leave all settings in the default. The final integrated images I export them to PixInsight for processing.
The final processing of my image I do in PixInsight, this is a very powerful image processing software. In the beginning it's a bit hard, because it uses a different philosophy like for example Photoshop. But once you get used to it, it's very pleasant working with.