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Old 09-03-2017, 12:33 PM
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sil (Steve)
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Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Canberra
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamJL View Post
I don't have, nor want a telescope. I just want something I can mount my camera/lens to, lol
I get the feeling you dont yet understand the terminology so you're not understanding the answers.

Simple answer: what you want doesnt yet exist at any price.

unsimple answer: what you want does exist but requires knowledge and understanding to assemble parts and configure controling software.

What you call a telescope is an OTA (Optical Tube Assembly), a tripod is the three legs on top of which sits a Mount that the OTA attaches. Some people call different combination of the three parts to be a "telescope".

The mount is the part that moves (manually, electrically or computer controlled). Even massively expensive mounts have a limit to how fine and precise its movements are. Plus over time normal wear and tear on the gears will effect the precision. In practice this means no one can guarentee a target will be dead center in your photos. plus the tracking precision changes through the night, due to temperature changes and balance changes etc. So we need to use an addon "guider" to periodically correct and get the mount tracking precisely again. A guider is usually a low power OTA mounted on, or parallel to, the main OTA with a high sensitive camera attached to a computer where software "lock" on to a star, measures its drift in position as the mount tracking changes and it then sends an adjustment to the mount to get it back pointing precisely again.

There are some assemblies that image and guide through the same camera and OTA but typically these are separate tasks.

I own a Celestron Star Sense scope package and you could use it for what you want and is probably the closest thing on the market (though I believe there are competing offerings from Meade and probably others, that do the same thing). The OTA is irrelevant to them all and you can attach a regular camera with lens onto a mont instead of an OTA and it will work just fine (I've done this with my gear in the past). The star sense is a cheap solution and not ideal if you have limited sky views and lots of sky pollution. The same will effect competing products. it consists of a small OTA, well a simple lens and camera assembly that you can access as a camera, it looks around the sky and tries to work out where it is (in minutes, NOT seconds).
Plus its mount needs to be horizontal like any other imaging setup. And of course my star sense is not an Equatorial mount, its AltAz so its not much use for long exposure dslr photography. And with EQ mounts, getting polar alignment and balance precise are a must, eyeballing, or close enough is not good enough, any tiny difference at the imagine rig show up magnified in the images just wasting your time if you get lazy in set up.


All of this stuff has its limits and tolerances and I know my star sense couldn't put Mars in my cameras field of view, but it was in the general vicinity, so a 300mm lens? I doubt it, 100mm maybe.

IF you were willing to learn and operate gear you can build something to do what you're wanting, but not a simple solution that you turn on and it does everything. If you understood you'd understand how close to impossible it would be.
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