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Gday Avron
The Eclipse camera is pretty much useless for doing pretty piccies as it doesnt shoot through the scope, its just a very wide angle webcam,
and as such has very little fine detail.
You can do multiple exposures if required, but you would have to run each shot manually and save to the SD card as you went
( of if you have a graphics card with capture facility, you can do grabs direct from the composite video feed out. )
As to "gearing", the LS setup is very robust, and will easily hold the weight without damage. The gears are all metal, and the motor unit is similar to that used in the LX200s ( ie a proper gearhead motor )
However, three drawbacks.
1) The fork arm bearings are very close together, and hence dont provide a very stable mount as the load goes up. I doubt it would break, but it will probably flex, and when it flexes, it affects clutch preload.
2) There is no user adjustable clutch, and hence no means to do balancing. I mounted a Meade microfocusser, 2"diagonal and binoviewer on the rear of mine and the DEC clutch actually started "oozing",
thus losing alignment. You need to test under load to see what happens.
3) There are no tapped holes in the OTA casting to mount any brackets or rails. Balancing may not be required for just a DSLR, hanging off the back,
however, to do a piggyback load, you may have to remove the reddot finder and use its bracket, but you also need to be careful as excess metal on top of the scope appears to affect the Nth sensor.
Also, as there are no tapped holes, the LS has no provision for mounting weight rails etc,
( and if you used an underneath rail, it blocks the camera ).
You could probably wire a weight to the tube support arm in a pinch,
but its not very elegant or adjustable.
Andrew
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