Astrophotography newbs - don't be fooled.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

I came across this add from a popular electronics shop (no not him). Yes if your lucky and patient with this mount (that is the big issue) you might be able to get some afocal shots of the moon. IF you perservier you MIGHT even be able to snap venus, mars, jupiter or saturn with this combination. Using a TouCam or LPI would do a better job. But don't be fooled by the hype of "Many Astronomical wonders".

The scope might be ok (never used one so I can't comment on it) and the camera and adapter will do afocal shots np (I have the same adapter, fiddly but it works) but the mount will drive you nuts trying to do visual work let alone astrophotography. And don't be fooled just because you can gat a Bonus motor drive. The drive might be handy if your using a ToUcam, and if you can prevent the mount from vibrating when you press the shutter button on the camera for afocal shots, it will help to keep objects sort of centered, but that's about it. It's possibly good enough to keep an object in the field of view for visual work, if you know how to get the mount roughly polar aligned.

If you want to get into astrophotography you have come to a great place to get the information you need. There are dozens of experienced astroimagers here. Avoid the temptation. Don't jump in and buy something like this until you've talked about it with someone with experience.

Besides check out the price of the same item here http://www.myastroshop.com.au/produc...asp?id=MAS-060

[Itchy]

A great "head up" Paul, and sound advice!


Cheers

[h0ughy (David)]

the nerve of some people, basically all you are buying is a digital camera and a scope, the mount is a joke. the camera is worth about $400, together with a $330 price adds up to around their hype price???

Good find Paul - hey we should have a shame file to keep this one in

[RAJAH235]

Good find, Paul. Nowt but bottom drawer stuff here. L.

[rumples riot]

Funny the stuff that some businesses will advertise.

[cventer]

Very commical considering that that camera and scope combination produce an image resolution of 1.45 Arc/secs per pixel.

Challenging image scale for someone with a well tuned G-11 never mind an Eq1/2.

Its almost criminal that they get away with selling those things advertised as such... Hopefully the sellers end up in a special type of hell where they have to stay there using that camera and scope until they produce a decent deep sky astrophoto.... Which means they are pretty much there for eternity...

Best Regards
Chris

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

I'm sure that Australian Consumer Affairs have a huge workload, but this is the sort of distorted advertising that is designed to purely rip the uninformed off.(not necessarily just this astrophotography rig). Surely someone has complained.

Maybe someone can explain to me why these mounts are even made. Two weekends ago I had three people ask me, at a sky show, to help them to set theres up and show them how to use scopes. Two of them were totally useless without a complete pull down and rebuild. And they each had only been used once or twice before. Why? Because the owners had no idea about how to use them. The third one was just usable, just.

To put it bluntly these people had been ripped off. Not because they had bought an EQ1/2 mount, but because they were sold a "Professional Astronomical Telescope" (as you will often read on the side of the box) sold to them by people who had no idea what they were talking about, nor about the quality of the product they were selling, nor could they give any help in the operation of the mount or telescope.

Surely there must be some sort of law in Australia to protect consumers for this type of exploitation

(Paul now climbs down off soapbox)

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

I could think of better things to spend $699 on.

[janoskiss (Steve H)]

Yes, like a 10" Dob.

[rochler]

to advertise something like that as a 'professional' telescope. They should be made to identify a single professional astronomer who has such a scope & is willing to endorse it hahaha! Whilst that advertisement doesn't actually make such claims, I've seen plenty of rubbish advertised on eBay that makes outrageous claims that couldn't possibly be proven.

I really dunno what consumer affairs actually does, 'coz they should be up to their armpits in court cases with the amount of shonky advertising that abounds...

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

When I was in Dork Smiths yesterday buying my USB extension cable I noticed they had Celestron 60mm refractors with GoTo! I think they were also $699.

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

Nope, even better! it's an 80mm with GoTo and it's only $499.
http://www.dse.com.au/cgi-bin/dse.st...uct/View/L8259