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Originally Posted by RockHound
First of all may i apologise to all in perth as i have bought a telescope and as such has been cloudy for the past few days  |
Congrats!
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My current thinking if getting a deep cycle battery and putting it in an enclosure and wiring some fused 12v cigarette lighter plugs off it. Currently i would need one for the mount and one for the laptop. How does that sound?
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Yep, that's what many of us here do. Laptops tend to be very power hungry (though the small netbooks are better) - you'll be a lot more energy efficient if you can run them directly off 12V power instead of going through a 240V inverter. You may also want to consider a dew heater...
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Second thing just to get started would be a T-adapter for my 60d and a field flattener. T-adapters and pretty standard but it is the field flattener that is the problem. I was looking at getting the Hotech SCA field flattener but everywhere looks to be out of stock i have seen the Orion field flattener on Bintels website would this be ok?
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In theory, yes - though your best bet would be to find examples of photos online where people have used the combination successfully. The William Optics P-FLAT3 (available from
Andrews) is meant to work with the Megrez 72.
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Thirdly using the laptop to guide the mount. To run the mount and get all the features  or does it really depend on the version of my mount (i have 3.25 on the controller)?
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You can just use the hand controller to begin with... you might find EQMOD a bit intense/intimidating at first while you're getting everything else set up.
Many guide cameras will have an ST-4 guide port (it's an RJ45 socket that looks like a normal landline telephone plug) that you can plug straight into the EQ6... i.e. you'll be able to run the mount from the hand controller and autoguide as well.
That said, I only use EQMOD with my EQ6 with a wireless gamepad - it's a really great piece of software
If you want the identical thing at half the price - and you're handy with a soldering iron - just buy
one of these cables from here, pick up a
DB9 connector from Jaycar or equivalent, cut off the black square end, and
solder three pins to the connector.
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I was thinking with a half decent drift alignment i could get a couple of minutes of half decent unguided exposures 
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Unfortunately, the EQ6's periodic error tends to be quite high (20 - 40 arc sec is typical) so you'll almost certainly get eggy stars with your Megrez 72 + Canon 60D with longer exposures (8 mins+) - even if you had "perfect" polar alignment.
If you use a reducer/flattener, have excellent polar alignment, and keep your exposures reasonably short (e.g. 2-3 mins) you could probably do without the autoguider. Your normal camera lenses - e.g. 50 mm - will also probably be fine unguided.
In case you were interested, something like this is popular for people to start with:
http://www.bintel.com.au/Astrophotog...oductview.aspx
By the way, drift alignment is great for refining polar alignment but it's very slow and painful when you're not even close to being aligned. Software such as
AlignMaster (would require something like EQMOD to control the telescope),
EQAlign, or even the SynScan hand controller firmware - v3.30 and later I think?), makes the process much faster and simpler.
Finally, you'll probably be satisfied with taking individual images when you first get everything up and running - but this becomes laborious when you want to take many subs over many hours. At that point, you may want to consider software such as
BackyardEOS or
APT to help out. I have BackyardEOS - it has some really helpful features to help with focusing, drift aligning, and dithering (nudging the mount between exposures) in addition to automatically running a large number of exposures.
Hope that helps! Good luck!
I was thinking with a half decent drift alignment i could get a couple of minutes of half decent unguided exposures 
