the equipment

An observatory is always under construction and the telescopes will change over time. Beside the large collection of scopes I inherited I will also test new equipment for my astrophotography. One thing is set for now: The mount is a trusty Losmandy G11 with Gemini2 Goto installed. This beautiful piece of machinery is “Made in USA”. The build quality is top-notch and the capacity quite often underestimated, thats something you don’t hear often about equatorial mounts…

At all times I have two telescopes installed side-by-side. The main telescope for planetary imaging is a Celestron C11 SCT, currently under pro-active maintenance (Its also not easy to balance against my lighter main imaging rig). Because of this my Celestron C8 EdgeHD and a William Optics Spacecat were installed for astrophotography in the first year. My main astrophotography camera is the ZWO ASI1600MM Pro, but a full-frame Sony A7Riii is also used occasionally.

Afterwards I did upgrade my main imaging telescope to a beautiful Takahashi Epsilon 130d. This powerful astrograph is a dream come true. I did need to upgrade the filter size to 31mm as well (I am currently using Astronomik LRGB,Ha,Oiii,Sii filters) but in combination with the ZWO autofocus this is a setup that I will need to spent a long time mastering. Currently I am mostly limited by my PixInsight abillities, but I am working on that 😉 This also freed up the Spacecat for the mobile astrophotography rig. For planetary work I currently use a ZWO ASI462MC camera on the C8 (with a 2x Barlow).