My Gear

Telescopes

For imaging larger nebula and other objects in the night sky I use a 103mm Askar apochromatic refractor. I use it at its native focal length of 700 mm with the 1x corrector at F7.

For smaller objects such as galaxies more resolution is needed. To this end I use my 8” Celestron Edge HD telescope at its native focal length of 2032 mm at F10.

My current camera is the ASI 2600MC Air. This all in one unit combines the 2600MC APS-C cooled camera sensor, an ASI 220MM guiding sensor, and an ASI air into one compact unit. The 55mm backfocus allows me to attach a 2 in filter drawer which I occasionally use to add a Ha/OIII dualband filter for getting Ha data for images.

Mount

For tracking the night sky I use the AM5 mount on the ZWO carbon fiber tripod with 200mm pier extension. While no counter weight is required I sometimes employ one with the Edge HD just to prevent any possible toppling. I use 2 second guiding exposures which typically gives guiding of around 0.4~0.7 arcseconds.