EQUIPMENT
Synta 200mm f/5 Newtonian is used as primary imaging scope. Canon 350D is mounted at prime focus using a T-ring adapter. The drawtube of the focuser was cut flush inside the OTA.
Autoguiding setup includes 90mm refractor, Neximage CCD Camera, GuideDog software, Starmate LX200 emulator and SkyScan autoguider port on the EQ6 mount. So far I haven't had any problems finding a guide star with this setup from my light polluted backyard. The guiderscope rings are homemade and without them it would be almost impossible to find a suitable guide star.
The Synta EQ6 SkyScan is a "goto" capable German Equatorial Mount (GEM). Some of its features needed for astrophotography include Periodic Error Correction (PEC), variable autoguiding rate, backlash compensation, autoguider input and may be the illuminated polarscope which I found it to be useless in my light polluted backyard.
The Starmate emulator converts LX200 autoguiding commands sent from my laptop to ST4 compatible format that the mount understands. It also plays an important role in automated exposures with the Canon DSLR. Motorised focuser controller is built into it as well. All these functions can be controlled through 2.4GHz wireless remote, which means I can stay well clear of the scope and keep it vibration free.
Compaq Presario laptop is the "brain" of the setup. The laptop is needed for autoguiding, drft alignment and image acquisition. The USB port is heavily relied upon for the guider cam, Starmate serial interface, EQ6 handset serial interface and the Canon DSLR interface.
On average I take about 20-30 automated exposures per target. Each exposure is downloaded to the laptop automatically which then saves the raw image files to an image processing PC inside the house via wireless network.
The Image processing PC is a 3.0GHz Athlon64 with SATA RAID. This PC converts the raw images into TIFF format which can typically blowout to about 1.3GBytes total for 30 frames of a nebula. The processing power, harddisk speed and RAM size play a big part when stacking 1.3GB of frames, especially 3am in the morning when you want to see the result before calling it a night.
That's a very brief rundown of my system without going into too much technical details. Also, below are some images of modified webcams I've built during the cloudy nights. They are far too power hungry (peltiers) to use on a portable setup so I have reserved them for a future permanent pier setup (as guide cams).
