As many of you know I have gotten into Astro Imaging in the last year. The other day I noticed my old 6″ F5 reflector just sitting in the corner of the garage and decided to see if it would make a fair imaging platform for cheep. It is on a Vixen Polaris “Clone” mount with dual axis drives. The problem with the drives is they had no guide port for imaging. I searched around the web and found an interesting modification that I could do to the hand controller to add an ST4 guide port to it. Here is the link to the article.
http://www.store.shoestringastronomy.com/eq_mod.pdf
Rather than purchase their kit I picked up the parts at Ace hard ware and did the mod my self. Here is the had controller with the new ST4 guide port. The white cable at the bottom of the controller.
I also had some adjustable rings and an old 60mm Celestron refractor that I could use as a guide scope. After some “Engineering” I got the whole thing together and working to my satisfaction. It turned out pertty nice, and seems to function well. I wanted a Wide field system that was compact, light weight, and portable. I think this little rig fits the bill. Here is what it looks like.
Last night 6/25/09 I got to give it a try and it worked flawlessly. The image it produced was very pleasing to me and gave me the wide field I was looking for. The light pollution in Sioux Falls limited my exposures to 15 seconds each so I took 130 of them and then stacked and processed them. Here was the outcome.
Not to bad for a bunch of parts laying around!
JJ
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