Hi Cyclops.
There are a couple of very important features a good astrophotography set up should have.
1. It must be stable. The tripod, mount and telescope connections must have as little movement/flexure in them as possible. That means those scopes with tubular aluminium legs are usually out.
2. You need to be able to accurately polar align your scope. Alt/Az mounts and fork mounts are not suitable unless they are modified with a wedge. For amateur photography generally the preferred option is some form of Equatorial mount though as mentioned before you can do it with fork mounts if you have a wedge.
3. Your mount needs to have some form of ability to track. Either manually if you are a glutton for punishment or electronically with motors attached to the mounts worm drives. Within this requirement is the desire for minimal periodic error (error within the worm drives. no drive is perfect and will track perfectly. There will always be some error. Try to minimise that)
5. A fairly "fast" scope. ie f4 to f6.5 to f7. Depending on what you are thinking of imaging will to a large degree determine the type of scope (reflector, refractor, sct, mak, mak-newt etc) you get and its focal length. For planetary work your mount is not as critical but you want a fairly long focal length to get adequate magnification. For DSO you want a good mount with generally shorter focal length scopes for wider fields.
Contrary to popular belief you don't need a goto scope to do astrophotography. They are certainly handy for finding those faint fuzzies but they are definately in the nice to have basket not the must have basket.
Hope that starts to give you some ideas
ps I would strongly suggest you don't think about getting any sort of setup until you've had the chance to check some out first. And definately don't get a scope from AG. Sure a couple of scopes I've seen there are ok, the nexstar for example, but it is definately not suitable for astrophotography unless it can be polar aligned.
|