Equipment Used

This is the main telescope I use.  It's a Meade LX90 Schmidt Cassegrain type, 200mm/8 inch aperture.  The handset hooked on the side is the main control interface for slewing and aligning the scope.  A PC can be attached to this, allowing the whole setup to be controlled by computer, even remotely.

On top are a Celestron 80mm/3 inch telescope mounted on a Losmandy DM8 dovetail plate with a pair of Losmandy DR125 rings.  This is used as a wide-angle guidescope, giving cracking views in itself too.  There's also a smaller 8x50mm guide scope and a red-dot sight for easy alignment of the main scope.  The Losmandy kit is very well made and this solid setup will eventually be used for autoguiding the scope, via computer control, for more accurate imaging.  The Celestron gives a wider field of view than the Meade, giving great views of the larger deep sky objects.  At the rear you can see a large square box, this is the flip mirror.  This allows viewing through an eyepiece (inserted at the top) to align an object, then by rotating a knob on the box a mirror rotates to reflect the light to a camera attached to the rear of the box.  Without this it is very difficult to get an object on the camera's CCD, especially for the Toucam webcam (see below).

View from the other side showing the 8x50 finder scope and the red dot sight fitted on top (with homemade battery pack attached)

A view from the viewing/imaging end (no camera attached in this image).  Note the focus position counter I built, just to the right of the flip mirror box.  (More on that at the modifications page)

A view down the business end.  The yellow square on the secondary mirror housing is a piece of Velcro to hold a Hartmann mask in position if needed, see mods page).  Not quite visible in this image is the dew heater system I recently built.  The heater ring sits inside the main aperture ring (where it says 'Ultra-High Contrast')

Some of the images you see on the other pages are taken through the Celestron 80mm itself.  I think it's a great little scope!  Here it is in the DR125 rings, mounted on the Losmandy dovetail plate, super-solid!

On the left is an old EQ3 mount (usually carries a 1970's Hilkin 60mm refractor) and on the right an EQ1 mount I purchased as a quick grab and go setup for viewing with the Celestron 80mm.  I tried to motorise the old EQ3 but the gearing is all wrong for what's available nowadays, so I bought a Right Ascension (RA) motor set for the EQ1 mount instead.

Here's the Hilkin 60mm.  Bit battered but still gives great views.  It's just under a metre long.

The EQ1 mount with the RA drive fitted, botched on to the old EQ3 tripod (required a spacer set welded up).  Cheap and cheerful, works a treat if your in a hurry or on your hols!

This is the RA controller and battery pack for the EQ1 mount.

A Marchwood 6105 for static shots.  Fast pan/tilt head, great for star trails, aurora etc

Canon 300D kit, shutter release cable etc.  Cracking camera it is too, no pic of it, I'm holding it!

This is a very heavily modified Toucam PCV740K.  I've carried out the Steve Chambers 1.5 mod to it, rehoused it in an old CCTV body and fitted it for M42/C-mount lenses.  It has an IR filter (removable), is force air cooled (fan on top), with a quick fit option of going Peltier cooled to -20C or so below ambient temperature.

A close-up of the CCD of the Toucam 740 showing the IR filter (blue/green) forming part of the sealed chamber to cut down dewing if in Peltier mode.  Also shown is the Pentax M42 mount and within it, the C-mount system.  Part of all this gubbins came from the external casing of a Sun Microsystems UNIX computer, making this probably the most valuable SC Toucam on the planet!!  ;)

Various odds and ends that make everything connect together.  That's a Meade 6.3 focal reducer right of centre, a must-have.

Various eyepieces and diagonals.

This is the Meade 2" flip mirror system.  It comes with various adapters to suit different imaging scenarios, great.  It's in a case I made up for it.

Some M42 fit lenses I've gathered, mainly for the Toucam, but once I got a T-ring for the Canon 300D I find I can use them with it aswell.

This is my homemade solar finder.  You would think that the easiest thing to point a telescope at in the sky would be the Sun.  No way!  I came up with this idea to solve the problem.  It's bits of plumbing fittings from B&Q that slide on to the dovetail of the 8x50 finder.  The images below show how it works.

This end is the objective end, it points at the Sun when mounted on the scope.  The sunlight travels through the pinhole on the end and then.....

....shows up here at the viewing end.  Once the sunlight is shining on the centre of the opaque plastic, the scope is lined up to the Sun.  Of course, viewing the Sun takes a bit of filtering....

I made this full aperture solar filter from Baader film mounted in an aluminium ring and more of that Sun Microsystems box.  It's a variable filter, from around eighth open to full open.  This image shows it about half open. (Yes that's an old plastic dinner plate!)

Here's the filter in it's fully open position.  The wrinkles on the Baader material make no difference to the viewed image.  It's generally accepted and makes life easier, it's almost impossible to avoid them anyway so making it loose is just fine.

And finally an old laptop for capturing the images from the cameras, focusing, night-sky software etc.  That's a homemade red USB powered light clamped to the top right of the screen.  It's very difficult to see a keyboard outside in the dark I quickly found out.