Scott's Astronomy Setup

Welcome, this page is dedicated to the telescope equipment that I personally own and use. If you have any questions about the items on this page, then send me an email and I'll see if I can help you out. The opinions and observations expressed below are entirely my own. I'll probably be adding pictures of the equipment and maybe some more detailed reviews/instructions as time goes by.

Location: Tucson, Az

Tucson has fairly good weather and decent dark skies. I'm a little bit out of the city, but still close enough to pick up a lot of light pollution. As to what degree this is going to effect my astrophotos, we'll have to wait and see.

Telescope: Meade 10" LX200

The LX200 is an excellent scope and offers many advanced features. One of the more important to me is the automatic GOTO capability. You can type in the name of any object you want and the scope will automatically slew and center that object for you. This can be a great time saver as many objects are hard to find. The accuracy of this feature depends greatly on how well you align the scope. A quick one star alignment gets fairly close, but you'll need to do a more careful two star alignment if you want things done right.

The LX200 has a ton of other advanced features -- you can have a look at Meade's site for more details. Altogether, it does just about everything I need and quite a bit of stuff I don't even understand yet! :)

CCD Camera: Meade Pictor 416XT

The camera and electronics appear well crafted, but the software has some major problems. Many Pictor owners have reported trouble getting things to work properly. If you are having trouble, I suggest consulting the MAPUG mailing list. My best results so far have been with using the SCSI interface. I was able to get it to work with an older Always IN-2000 SCSI adapter out of my "junk pile", as well as a brand new state-of-the-art Adaptec 2940UW.

Eyepieces: Celestron Ultima 40mm, Meade Series 4000 Plossl 26mm, Vixen 6mm

The local telescope store owner helped me pick out the Ultima and Vixen eyepieces and I am quite satisfied with them. The 40mm is very useful for getting low magnification of deep space objects, while the 6mm is really nice on planets and the moon, and the 26mm is a good all-around compromise. I also have an older (15yrs old!) Kellner .96 12mm eyepiece which I can use with an adapter, but it's not quite up to the standards of the other newer eyepieces.

35mm Stuff: Canon EOS 650, Nikon Nikormat, Orion Universal Camera Adapter & Ring

The EOS 650 is a nice camera and can take an awesome prime focus picture of the moon while set on automatic. Unfortunately, the camera is not the greatest thing in the world for doing manual exposures, since it requires some expensive adapters to do exposures over 15 seconds. The Nikon is completely manual, and I've taken a few pictures with it, but I'm still not very good at setting exposures. Orion makes a nice Universal Camera Adapter. It lets you do prime focus as well as eyepiece projection photography.

Observatory: Almost Completed!

I've written up a page with full details on the observatory. Even though I'm still finishing it up, the observatory is already a great help... and it only took a few weekends to complete!

Wedge: Meade SuperWedge

I originally started operating in Alt/Az operation. I couldn't believe how much easier things are now that I have the SuperWedge. Since the scope is permanently mounted in my observatory, I only have to perform a trivial alignment to get the scope working, which is a real help. Using the wedge also allowed me to clear up a lot of jitter that I was getting from the declination motor.

Computers: many

I have a good half-dozen computers laying around the house -- parts are being changed around all the time right now. Hopefully, once I get the observatory built, things will settle down a bit. I'm planning on setting up one machine outdoors to run the telescope/ccd and running an ethernet (10 megabit Coax) into the house and locating another computer indoors to run things. I'll update this list if/when things get worked out.

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