Battery for 3 nights?

[Camelopardalis]

Folks,

Could anyone recommend a battery pack for powering my EQ6 and possibly Nexstar scopes for the duration of IISAC?

Naturally, I'm looking for the holy grail...easy on the pocket and easy on the back :D and preferably someone I can pick up in the Sydney area? I'm a bit lost looking for this sort of thing here :sadeyes:

Cheers,
Dunk

[AG Hybrid]

26 amp hour battery from jaycar are well priced. Under 100 I think. As you may remember I have a 18 ah battery that covers my DSC and my 140mm 12v mirror fan. Averaging 3 hours per session I didn't have to charge it for 6 nights. The only reason I plugged it in for charging is because I didn't know if it was going to go flat or not. I'm thinking about smaller 9 ah battery for IIAC, just to run the 12v mirror fan constantly during all 3 nights.

Edit: the 26ah battery is $129

[MortonH]

Remember you can recharge in the house during the day.

[h0ughy]

well your going to need to run a dew heater - guaranteed , so you will need a separate battery for that - wont be that cheap though as you will need over 100Amp hour battery - i used to run 3 deep cycle batteries to run camera, scope and dew heaters and laptop

[killswitch]

Its best you calculate the draw of all 12v equipment first (mount, heaters, etc) so you know what capacity to buy. A multimeter is handy for these.

The EQ6 on its own roughly draws 2A at full slew and 0.5A tracking. Since your tracking most of the time you can probably average that off to about 1A (1Ah)

1Ah x 5 hour session = 5Ah~

I would recommend a 25-40Ah battery as you dont want to discharge a deep cycle battery past 50% capacity, and you want as much headroom as you can get.

[Screwdriverone]

Hi Dunk,

If you are planning on imaging, just set up in the imaging area up top, I did this last year and had 240VAC the entire time, didn't need any batteries at all. We all "stole" a connection from each other and had cables set up first thing for the scopes and in the morning, could plug in toasters etc as needed.

There is somewhat limited room, so if you are getting there late on Thursday, or even Friday, or prefer the bottom visual field, simply recharge during the day as suggested previously and get yourself an AGM battery and a quality charger.

Cheers

Chris

[Camelopardalis]

Thanks chaps, I guess I just don't want to leave my charging opportunities to chance :sadeyes:

I have my usual astro power too, one 7Ah and one 8Ah which have always lasted the night with room to breathe in the Blue Mountains but don't want to be caught without. The Nexstar is my contingency, for when the C11 dews up :lol: