I have recently bought a Skywatcher Star Adventurer. I bought this as I felt it better suited my needs and would work better for me with time lapse and even some wide field DSLR imaging.
It comes with adapters to hold a DSLR, declination wedge, polar scope, polar scope illuminator, counter weight and counter weight bar ,mount itself, dove tail bars and manual. It is very well packed into several small boxes.
The mount operates on two types of power sources. One being 4AA batteries or a usb B port.
It has several settings for speeds including sidereal, lunar, solar and 4 other speeds. It has a switch for both northern and southern hemispheres with the addition of fast adjustment buttons to get your object centred.
The mount has clutches that hold everything nice and tight and is a step up over some other models. There is even slow motion declination axis adjustment for use to centre up your images.
With the declination wedge it mounts directly onto a standard tripod and can carry a D4 with 70-200mm lens. I am yet to test how well it will work but it seems to work without struggling with that camera.
I am looking forward to using it in its various modes and see what I can do with it. One of which will be to take it on our next total solar eclipse chase.
I will let do an update once I have taken some shots.
I'd be interested to see how you're going with the adventurer. I'm toying with the idea of getting one and for all intensive purposes they seem very capable. What kind of images have you been able to collect with it?
I helped a young Canberra Astronomical Society member set his up a few weeks ago on one of our dark sky nights. It looks to be a really well made unit and had no problem giving him nice round stars in 2 minute exposures.
I've asked the missus to get me one for my birthday!
I have done a couple of tests with the unit. So far I found it quite hard to use the polar scope but one I got the unit close to polar aligned it worked well with round stars. I think I was doing 30 second and 1 minute exposures. It was good for wide field views. I have not processed the images yet but I took a good look at a few frames and I was impressed with how each frame looked.
It's a good unit overall but more testing and will demonstrate its worth.
Greg, the units currently retail for around $600 at Bintel. It comes with a counter weight, a tripod adapter and dove tails.
Here is an example of using the Star Adventurer with a 5D Mk III and Canon 50mm F1.4 under relatively dark skies, but with a bright Moon still above the horizon so I had a few gradients to deal with.
5 x 60 secs, F5.6, ISO800. (No Flats and no Darks)
I haven’t done much wide field stuff so I struggled a little with the processing, especially with colour balance, vignetting and gradients.
my brother just got one a few days ago and it seems to have unlimited capabilities, he even tried his orion cf ed 80 triplet and it balanced nicely!
one thing i dont think paul pointed out is that it even has a guide port!
thursday night he was getting a 1 min. exposure on his canon 200mm f2.8 prime
paul, also he had the idea of flipping the switch to north and clicking it to 12x speed (so reverse) and taking an exposure to see where the pole was, seemed to work ok
pat
Any updates on this Paul ? That's if you have had a chance to play more.
Quite similar results to Dennis. I really like it. Works really easily but a bit of a pain to PA. I will have to get accustomed to the polar scope. Other than that these are a nice piece of kit.
Quite similar results to Dennis. I really like it. Works really easily but a bit of a pain to PA. I will have to get accustomed to the polar scope. Other than that these are a nice piece of kit.
For the PA illuminator, I ditched the OEM one (powered by a CR2032 battery) as my copy did not turn off, the red LED just dimmed but there was no <click> to turn it off, so I was concerned about battery drain.
I found that the plastic, orange coloured electrical conduit as found in Bunnings, fitted nicely in the illuminator hole, so I cut off a 3 or 4 cm length, drilled a 12mm dia hole at one end and screwed in an illuminated eyepiece reticule battery unit whose brightness I can vary as appropriate. It also switches off positively.
For the PA illuminator, I ditched the OEM one (powered by a CR2032 battery) as my copy did not turn off, the red LED just dimmed but there was no <click> to turn it off, so I was concerned about battery drain.
I found that the plastic, orange coloured electrical conduit as found in Bunnings, fitted nicely in the illuminator hole, so I cut off a 3 or 4 cm length, drilled a 12mm dia hole at one end and screwed in an illuminated eyepiece reticule battery unit whose brightness I can vary as appropriate. It also switches off positively.
Cheers
Dennis
Dennis, was that 20mm or 25mm conduit? do you think grey would work too?
just seen this thread pop up again and here are the first few pics with this mount, sorry about processing, not very good at that yet!
samyang 35mm f1.4
canon 85mm f1.4
canon 70-200 @ 200mm
Yeah I like it. I have had a few plays with it now and found the Polar scope works quite well if you take the time to use a compass and inclinometer first. I got almost on the right spot and finding the stars was very easy from there. I am going to be using it again very soon and hope to achieve better results again.
while playing around with it today i realised that the reticle was loose. A grub screw was loose so i had to go back to scratch to fix it. I set up looking at a point in the distance (fence line) and set the reticle up and turned it 90 degrees at a time, adjusting the reticle with the grub screws until i had the central cross stay on target when turned through a full 360 degrees. took me over an hour but I did it. so I paid the price for a loose bit of kit. Just glad I found it while mucking about trying to emulate the big "D" with his reticle illuminator. also explains why i was getting drift the last time i used it
