EQ2 motor drive upgrade. Waste of money?

[CJ (Chris)]

I'm contemplating adding a drive motor to my Eq2 with a view to doing some barn door style photography. I'm wondering how successful this might be or should I put I money towards something like a Polarie. I don't mind treading the upgrade path if it's a useful learning experience, but if it's a pointless exercise I'd rather wait.
Has anyone else tried this setup and was it worthwhile?
Cheers

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Up until 2012, that's how I used to do all my astrophotography. For short lenses up to about 200mm they are okay, depending on the periodic error of the mount. I even added a guide scope with reticle eyepiece to track by eye. With that I could do a couple of minutes with an ED80, although it was tiresome and needed a lot of corrections. But for short tele lenses they are fine.

This is a pic of comet C/2014 E2 (Jacques) with my old Tasco mount unguided, 20 second subs with an EQ2 motor drive and 135mm lens.

[julianh72 (Julian)]

I'm using the Orion EQ-2 motor drive ($99 from BinTel http://www.bintel.com.au/Mounts---Tr...oductview.aspx ), and it works fine.

If you take a minute or two to get a reasonable polar alignment, you can do visual tracking such that the target will stay in the centre of the eyepiece view for half an hour or more, and this is fine for wide angle astro-photography using a DSLR and telephoto lens on the EQ-2 mount, or a short focal length telescope. It also works fine for shooting video (or lots of still frames), even at longer focal lengths, and stacking using RegiStax or similar.

For long-exposure long-focal-length astro-photography, you're probably going to need a better mount - but a $99 upgrade can buy you a lot of fun (and you can develop your technique too) before you shell out the big bucks for a better mount.

Here's my quick guide on how to get a good polar alignment (better than 1 degree on both axes) in a minute or two on an EQ-2 using your smartphone:
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...9&postcount=19

[Shiraz (Ray)]

definitely worth doing. I have an ancient skyview mount (worse than an EQ2) with RA motor drive that is fine for a wide variety of short focal length/short period imaging. It can even be used for solar system imaging with a modest achro - got some really good images of the Venus transit for example http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...ad.php?t=91864 .

[CJ (Chris)]

Thanks fellers. Impressive photos. I'm sold!
Julian, that's exactly the motor I have my eye on. Thanks.