New scope - Guiding or No-Guiding?

[Superb_Universe]

Hi, I have recently purchased Orion-80 ED APO on Sirius EQ-G GO-TO mount :). I am planning to take long exposure photos of moon.

Q1: Does anyone is aware; this mount supports Guiding? or i have to buy additional accessories?
If yes, Which one? I have laptop with stellerium software. Will it help?

Q2: I have Canon EOS-300 (Rebel) SLR camera with the 58mm diameter lens, Which i am planning to use for astro photography. Which adapter i have t o buy to connect this camera to the orion scope? :doh:

Q3: For south east melbourne area; any advise on polar alignment? Which angle? :screwy:

Thanks

[citivolus]

Hi there. :welcome: to the world of astrophotography. You've taken a rather large bite here, hopefully we can help you break it down into digestible chunks to keep your brain from hemorrhaging while trying to sort it all out.

Not to poke fun, but long exposure photos of the moon would be what, 1/10 second? I suspect that you mean stacking lots of short images to improve image quality?

Be warned, the Canon EOS 300 is not optimal for this purpose, as it will vibrate up a storm if you are constantly firing off the shutter, and it will need to stop to write out to the memory card rather frequently. Do you have a remote release for it so that you are not sitting there pressing the shutter button? Also, you can't really guide with it. Most of the stacking work on planets is done with webcams or other cameras that have a video out mode.

The following assumes that we have gotten past the above, and that you have a separate guide camera on a guide scope piggybacked on your mount:

1. The mount seems to have an ST-4 type autoguider interface. From what I can find, it does not have a serial interface, meaning your guide camera will need to output ST-4 autoguide signals rather than using a PC to do the work. There are adapters available for controlling ST-4 from a PC if needed. See http://www.store.shoestringastronomy.com/products_gp.htm

Alternately, yes, it supports manual guiding. You could probably guide on the moon through the finder scope :D

2. The following put together should work:

https://www.bintelshop.com.au/Product.aspx?ID=7082
https://www.bintelshop.com.au/Product.aspx?ID=7403
https://www.bintelshop.com.au/Product.aspx?ID=5550

Hopefully that gets you back far enough to reach focus. I need the extension to reach focus if I use a barlow. If you don't use a barlow, the moon won't be full frame due to the low focal length.

3. If you are referring to stacking lots of very short images, you're not going to need much of a polar alignment at all. The polar scope in the HEQ5 (the other name for that mount) should be more than adequate for your purposes. Melbourne is 37.8 degrees south.

All of this sounds like something you may want to run past the guys at a local astronomy club, so that they can give you pointers and correct any of my errors. There may be expectations about how this will all work that won't be met if you follow my advice, so I would really suggest making a few new friends at a club :)
Hopefully this isn't too intimidating. :eyepop:

Regards,
Eric

[iceman]

Hi there and welcome to IceInSpace!

As Eric said, you don't need long exposures to photograph the moon, and you don't need guiding either. You don't even need tracking.

But an ED80, combined with a 300D, will take nice prime focus moon shots where the moon will fill about half of the frame.

Good luck!