Equipment & Gear

Having recently moved back to Canada from Hong Kong you could say I've sort of re-discovered my astronomy passion. It's difficult, if not impossible to do any form of meaningful stargazing in the light (and other) polluted skies of Hong Kong. So after being back in Canada for about 18 months I've managed to aquire quite a bit of very useful stargazing gear. So far all my astrophotography has been done with using the equipment below:

8" Celestron SCT

Skywatcher HEQ5
PST Solar Telescope
Homemade 6" Dobsonian

I just purchased a Televue 85 apochromatic refractor as well as an adm side by side cradle. In addition to these I've also aquired a LVI 2 autoguider but none of this new equipment has been tested since the weather in Vancouver right now is absolute crap.

On the one decent night in the last three months I set up my gear in a park across the street from my apartment and snapped this photo of it. If you look really closely in the background you can see a single bright 'star' which is actually Jupiter.

Because it was about -5 Celsius at the time I was only out for about 90 minutes but during that time I managed to get one half decent picture of the Orion nebula which I've included below.

Anyway, this will probably be the last post for a few weeks because it looks like nothing but rain in the forecast. Figures, just when I get new gear that I want to use.....