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Thankyou everyone for your encouraging comments. I tried again to photograph Eta Carina last Friday. I started setting up 21:00 on Friday night and packed it up at 4:30 Saturday morning with nothing to show for my efforts.
The problem I had was with my mount, it is severly overloaded and depending what position it is in it has a tendancy to jump. Also, regardless of how much I tighten the cogs on the motors and RA and DEC axis they're still to loose, resulting in a significant delay (1 - 2 seconds) whenever I want to adjust the RA or DEC.
I suppose if I were the patient kind of guy I could have sat there and manually guided. I ummed and ahhed about how I could go about fixing my mount but no matter which way I looked at it it was always going to be overloaded.
I could have gooten rid of the 400D and just used those webcam imagers to do my photography thus allowing it to double as a guide camera but, no offence to those who use them, the images they produce are just no where near as good as those produced by DSLR's. As such I am always going to need a seperate guidescope and hence the weight issue all over again.
My solution? I purchased a HEQ5 from Bintel on Saturday. After I regrease it and puchase another 5.2kg weight I should be ready to get crackin this Friday/Saturday (moon be dammed!!!)
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