Mick has a Meade LX200 8″ telescope and was previously using a Celestron NexImage for lunar and planetary imaging.

Mick was stated as saying “I am very impressed with the image quality of the camera, the colour range, tonal range and sharpness. Jupiter shows Io and its shadow on the cloud tops and greater detail in the bands. All the Moon photos have a greater tonal range and detail compared with the webcam, the Cassini image was taken at 1200 x 1000 at 27 fps 600 frames”.

He went on to say “It wasn’t a particularly good night with some high cloud and I had to load the software and learn the new software, there are a lot more controls than the webcam, this QHY IMG132E has a lot of potential and I am looking forward to imaging Saturn and Mars”.

So he was very impressed with it, which makes me wonder if I should get one as well. I currently have an Imaging Source DMK21 mono, which is great for lunar and solar imaging, but it’s a pain having to change the filters to get a colour planetary image, so I may go for a colour camera next time, plus the DMK21 640×480 size is a bit small sometimes, so a bigger chip like the one on the QHY IMG132E would be better.

But let’s look at the images:

All images by Mick Jenkins 2012

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But I hate having to remember to charge it everytime the day before I want to observe. So to get around this I purchased a 12v 4.8w Solar Panel from Maplin to keep the battery topped up. This is a good idea, but the window in my observatory does not get much light and there is not much sun around in the winter.

So I decided to instead purchase a desktop power supply for the observatory, why I never bought one in the first place – god only knows! As I have power sockets in the observatory. It was probably because everyone seemed to have a Powertank so I thought I’d better get one as well.

After scanning the web and the astronomy retailer sites, I wanted an observatory power supply which did not have a fan in it (I like silence when observing), one that had enough amps to power my equipment and one that did not cost too much to have it posted to me, as these things are heavy.

In the end I purchased the Rapid 4A 13.8V Fixed output DC regulated power supply. It was only £43.20 inc VAT with Free Delivery.

I ordered it at lunchtime direct from Rapid and it came via UKMail the next day, looking at it, it seems very well made and robust and does the job nicely.

I can thoroughly recommend it as a silent observatory power supply for your telescope, dew heaters, CCD cameras etc.

Rapid 13.8v 4-6amp Observatory Power Supply Features:

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Bahtinov masks designed by Pavel Bahtinov, basically aid you when focusing your telescope for either visual or imaging use. They appear to be an improvement on the Hartmann mask (which I also own but I only use it to hold a smaller screw-in solar filter). The Hartmann mask (if you have three holes in it) will produce three blurry images of your target, and then once you bring the object into focus, the images merge into one. But the Bahtinov mask is a far superior focussing aid than the Hartmann mask as it uses diffraction spikes to help you with your focussing.

Luckily Bahtinov masks come in a variety of sizes from 80mm to 12”+ sizes, as I have two scopes, one is an 80mm and the other my 10” LX200, prices vary on size.

I got my hands on an 80mm size Bahtinov for my Skywatcher ED80 Pro telescope from Green Witch.

The Bahtinov mask itself was made by the Canadian company Kendrick, their version is quite flexible and comes with three rubber type bungs which hold the mask in place, as I have seen a lot of Bahtinov masks sold with just the mask and no fixings.

My Meade 10” LX200 Bahtinov Mask came from the astronomy retailer SCS Astro.

This mask was made by a company called FarPointAstro.

The design of this mask is very different from the smaller 80mm Bahtinov Mask as this larger mask does not have rubber bungs, but slips onto the secondary mirror hub on the front of the telescope.

So it is really easy to slip it on and off of the telescope, a great design.

I actually decided to amend the design of it slightly by adding some white adhesive pads to each corner of the SCSAstro Bahtinov Mask. I did this to raise the height of the mask away from the main glass on the front of the telescope so I had less chance of putting fingerprints on the front of my telescope glass.

You begin by directing your telescope towards a star and then place the Bahtinov mask over the end of your telescope. The Bahtinov mask then produces three sets of spikes. The great thing is that the position of the spikes will tell you all you need to know about how well your telescope is focused.

If you change the focus knob you on your telescope you will see that two of the spikes stay in the same place, acting like a cross-hairs, whilst the third spike moves up and down across the image. Once the moving spike is centered you are in focus, simple.

Then lock your focus in, and remove your mask and then start observing or imaging. If you need to re-focus just follow the same procedure again.

One of the benefits of these masks is that they are so light and are easy to place on the end of your telescope, so there is little chance of you moving your scope when attaching a Bahtinov mask.

Most good astronomy retailers now sell Bahtinov masks in various sizes for all of the most popular telescope sizes. My Bahtinov masks came from Green Witch and SCS Astro and both were very reasonably priced, you can find the range of Bahnitov Masks at Green Witch here and Bahtinov Masks at SCS Astro here.

This is a photo of the SCSAstro Bahtinov mask on my Meade 10″ LX200. It’s easy to fit and easy to remove once your telescope is focused.

If you really want to make your own Bahtinov mask (which can be very fiddly to cut out and a lot of effort is required) then you can get an image file off of the internet which can be sized in a photo editor program to fit your scope and then the template can be printed out. The choice of raw material for the mask would be up to you.

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But don’t get me wrong I still like Baader filters as I still have a fringe killer, uv/ir  and solar continuum filters from them.

The thing I like best about the Astronomik filters is how slim they are, and I never have any trouble screwing them into filter wheels, they also don’t catch on filter wheels like the height of the Baader filters.

Due to the cost of 2″ versions of filters I have gone with the 1.25″ range of filters, plus the filters wheels in the 1.25″ versions are also cheaper, this one was from StayFocused.eu

The OIII CCD filter comes in the standard Astronomik no-frills box with a black foam backing. I was getting confused by the labels Astronomik put on their boxes, but now I think the white and black labels are the newer versions of the filters.

As the name suggests the OIII CCD filter comes with  a built-in IR-blocker up to 1150nm, so you don’t need an additional IR-blocker with this filter.

The Astronomik OIII CCD filter is a narrow band emission-line-filter for CCD photography. The filter lets the light of double ionized Oxygen of emission nebulae pass and blocks nearly the whole remainder of the spectrum where the CCD is sensitive.

The Astronomik OIII CCD increases the contrast between objects, in this case between the OIII emission line and the skyglow background. Our Astronomik OIII CCD completely suppresses the emission lines of artificial lighting (mercury (Hg) and sodium (Na)) and skyglow.

The full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 12 nm is optimal suitable for common CCD cameras and allows the use of very fast optics The optimal aperture ratio for the use of the filter is 1:3 to 1:15 with apertures of more than 6″ (150mm).

When using the Astronomik OIII CCD filter together with the H-alpha, OIII CCD and the SII CCD filters you can obtain three-color images of emission line objects (gas nebulae) from locations with very strong light pollution. To do so, you would take an image in three different wavelengths, select each one as a color-channel in Photoshop and paste them together as one single color image.

• 95% transmission at 496nm (OIII)
• 95% transmission at 501nm (OIII)
• Full width at half maximum 12nm
• Transmission from 494nm to 506nm
• Parfocal with other Astronomik filters
• Glass thickness: 1mm
• Completely resistant against high humidity, scratches and aging effects
• Diffraction limited, the filter will not reduce the optical performance of your telescope!
• Astronomik filters are delivered in a high-quality, long lasting, filter box

Astronomik OIII filters and other Astronomik filters can be purchased from StayFocused.eu

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2. Sky-watcher 1.25 Inch Light Pollution Filter by Sky-Watcher
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I ordered the Netgear DGN3500 on a Thursday morning at 8am and received the item via Fedex on Monday morning, not too bad considering it came from South of France. It’s also fun tracking your parcel on the Fedex website as I saw it come up to Paris and then arrive in Stansted and then come to Cambridge.

I previously had a Netgear DG834G for around 5 years, and it was the first wireless router I ever bought. It has been rock solid for all those years and is still going strong, and it never needed rebooting or anything. All I did was keep feeding it the latest firmware. So I opted for another Netgear.

The first thing that strikes you is the increased size of the DGN3500 compared to my DG834. Something you’ll see below in the image:

I had hoped that I would export all my settings from my old router and then just import them into the new router, but unfortunately this did not work, so I had to manually enter my settings. This is not really a problem as the admin panel looks the same as I was used to.

As most of my PC’s now have gigabit ethernet I was looking forward to increased speed over the network. I currently had a mixture of Cat5 and Cat5E network cables. I was happy to see that the Cat5E cables all provided gigabit connectivity as on the router it shows gigabit in green and 10/100 as orange.

Even though the Cat5E cables are fine for gigabit I still ordered a couple of 3m Cat6 cables to see if I could get more speed, but I can’t really tell that I have gotten any extra speed.

One new thing with the DGN3500 is that it has a USB socket on the back allowing you to connect a USB hard drive or stick pen for network attached storage. I have plugged in a 16GB USB pen for temporary storage purposes. You can set this up via the netgear control panel and provide password access, or add folders to it, you can even specify if only certain USB drives are allowed to be connected to the DGN3500 modem router.

Something new for me is that the DGN3500 has an on/off switch on the back as well as a reset switch.

As Pixmania is a French company some people are worried about plugs being 2 pin plugs etc. But don’t worry Pixmania provide a 3 pin plug adaptor which just clips onto the 2pin adaptor – brilliant!

The only other difference from buying from Pixmania is that they the European version does not include the standard UK white phone filters, but instead you get some strange French phone adaptors pictured below. But if you already have phone filters you probably won’t need any more of them, and if you do I am sure they are cheap to buy.

Overall the Netgear DGN3500 seems a very good wireless modem router. It’s early days yet, but I have had no problems yet. Speed is good, although I would have thought that signal strength could be better, but that could be down to my wanting great signal strength when I am in my observatory in the garden, it could also be that my wireless router usb adaptor needs some new drivers.

I could not fault the price at Pixmania as I think I paid about £88 including delivery for the DGN3500-PES version from Pixmania, where as everyone else wants about £110 delivered for the DGN3500-UKS version.

Get your Netgear DGN3500 from Pixmania here.

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The major downside of the new SPC1300 is that the sensor is a CMOS sensor where as the SPC900 is a CCD sensor. But will this make a lot of difference when undertaking astrophotography?

Is the SPC1300 the new SPC900? Can the SPC1300 be taken apart and the lens removed and a standard plastic lens adaptor be screwed in? I suppose the only way to find out is to purchase one and try and take it apart.

The cheapest place to buy from seems to be Amazon or Pixmania for around £50.

The weight of the webcam is only 110g and the fixed lens is f/2.8

If anybody has more information on this, or has one and has adapted it, I would love to know about it, so please leave some comments about it.

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I ended up selling my 400D camera on Amazon and then purchased my new Canon 450D from Dixons, for £446 which luckily included a £50 cashback offer from Canon as well as free delivery at the time.

The main reason for the upgrade was the Live View mode, my main problem with doing astrophotography for me was getting the object in focus in the small cameras viewfinder. I did invest in a right angled viewfinder with 2x magnification, but even that was not that easy to use, but it did help.

There is not a great deal of difference cosmetically between the cameras. The menus and layout of the camera are very similar. If you already have a 350d or 400d then you will find using the 450d really easy.

The new 450D is lighter than the 400D, it also has a nice feel to the grip now, with a kind of mottled effect. The 450D now comes with a Image Stabilised lens (IS) which is a nice touch.

On the back of the 450D are the biggest changes, with the buttons moved around in order to accommodate the new slightly larger 3 inch screen.

The Canon battery type has changed and the Compact Flash card slot has been replaced with an SD card, which is useful, as it seems most cameras have now gone back to SD cards, as my HD camcorder also takes SD cards.

The 450D now has 12 mega-pixels instead of the 10 mega-pixels in the 400D.

The Live View mode works in all modes except in Automatic mode, so don’t expect to use the live view just like a compact digital camera. After pressing the “Set” button to enter Live View mode you can zoom in on the object by 5x or 10x magnification, which should help with focusing whilst doing astrophotography. I think you can also get a live view through a PC or laptop, even more useful.

The standard ISO settings are still there. I would have thought we would have seen an ISO setting of 3200 available, but maybe that will be on the next model, 500D? I also think the next model will have 15 megapixels and probably an HD video recording facility. But we will have to wait and see.

Overall the 450D seems worth upgrading to if you really think you need an extra 2 megapixels or the live view mode, otherwise stick with the 400D if you have it. If you don’t have a DSLR then the Canon 450D is a great camera and worth a purchase.

The best price for the Canon 450D Digital SLR Camera seemed to be from either Dixons or Amazon when I was looking.

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Once it arrived I was amazed by the small size of it and how light it was, especially compared to my 1st 8mm camcorder I bought 15 years ago which is now out of service.

This now means I have another option for recording astronomy, not just my webcam, Meade DSI Pro or Canon DLSR. The first thing I need to figure out is how to attach the SD9 camcorder to my telescope. I am hoping to find a simple 37mm threaded adaptor which will fit directly onto the front of the camcorder which will allow me to connect the other end as 1.25″ or 2″ eyepiece.

The manual mode of the camcorder does allow you to change the shutter times from 1/25 to 1/8000. This was useful for those night shots, especially when shooting the footage below that I took of the moon, which I took using a 1/4000 shutter speed via a tripod on full zoom which is 10x. You can also change the apeture setting as well. (From viewing these videos you will see that the viewing ratio has changed in YouTube as the moon looks a bit elongated, plus note you will not really see the HD quality on these videos).

There is a larger zoom than 10x, but this is digital and you lose quality and gain pixelisation when using digital zoom, so it’s not recommended to use it, and a good thing is that in the menu you can actually turn off the use of the digital zoom.

Viewing the files recorded in the AVCHD format is tricky, Windows Media Player will play the files but you may need to install special codec onto the PC to get it to work. Each file is located in a folder called “stream” as an .MTS file.

There is a supplied CD which allows you to first download the video footage to your PC and then edit it via an included program, which can output your video as MPEG2. Though as you have probably seen from the YouTube videos that the ratio is different as YouTube has squashed the videos.

The quality of the recordings are very good, the picture is clear and the sound good, but at the moment I don’t have an HD TV though, so I am probably not getting the best from the camcorder.

 There are other accessories to buy though such as macro lenses, so I have an idea of using the camcorder with a macro lens on and to record meteor showers by leaving the camcorder on a tripod and recording for 2hrs at a time, so then I should hopefully then get some footage of some meteors.

So far I can thoroughly recommend the Panasonic SD9 camcorder, the only downside at the moment is that spare batteries are hard to find and expensive. 

I purchased my Panasonic SD9 from Amazon, which I think was the cheapest although, it can be purchased from other online electrical retailers such as Currys and John Lewis.

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I would have loved to have purchased a DSI Pro III, but there was no way I was going to spend £600 on a Deep Sky Imager, that’s the price of a new laptop, maybe in the future the price will come down and I may upgrade.

Anyway I have used the new Pro II version a couple of times and I can tell that it is slightly better than the first version, obviously there are more pixels that can be captured.

I was amazed to find out that there was no Autostar CD in the box, there was only an instructional DVD, which is the same as on the Meade website.  My first version did come with an Autostar CD, but maybe now they just expect you to download the latest version.

This is exactly what I did, as my original DSI came with something like Autostar v3, and I am now running something like v5. One of the main differences to the DSI software is that it now contained a field telling me the temperature of the CCD.

Now I think I have too much choice of what to use to image, do I use the DSI, Canon DSLR or Webcam? I am also thinking of purchasing a High Definition Camcorder to video our new child, but I’m sure I’ll want to somehow attach the camcorder to the telescope as well.

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The binoculars being reviewed are from Telescope Planet and they are their own make, and are 15×70 (15x zoom with a 70mm lens diameter). They have a nice feel to them as they have a rubberised coating, which I am told is good for grip and reduces the formation of dew.

These binoculars are good for all types of viewing but really excel at astronomy, due to their 15x magnification and 70mm lens. It’s strange to think that even some telescopes have this size lens diameter.

The binoculars come in their own soft case and come with a binocular strap and cleaning cloth, as well as all eyepiece covers.

These 15×70 binoculars are not light, and I did find myself only being able to hold them for a few minutes before my arms got tired and I started to view star trails with my arms shaking.  I found the best way to hold these long binoculars was by holding the end of the binoculars with both hands, instead of up near the eyepiece and focuser.

The good thing is that they have a standard Universal Bush built into them beneath a protective screw on cover. I would thoroughly recommend purchasing a binocular L bracket (around £10) and putting them on a tripod to get the most out of these, perhaps something I should look at purchasing next.

I could then imagine myself just sitting in the garden on a chair with the binoculars on my tripod gazing up at the stars all night long when I did not want to setup my LX200 outdoors.

The binoculars come with a standard dioptre adjustment, and they allow you to change the distance between the eyepieces to match your pupil distance.

The focus adjuster was quite stiff and did appear to spring back a little, but it did keep focus and with a bit more use it should become easier to use.

Views of the moon were brilliant with a very fine crisp detail being provided of the lunar surface. I also managed to track satellites in the sky with these binoculars and I even managed to witness a shooting star through them, something that was not visible with the naked eye.

Overall, a very nice pair of binoculars with good magnification and viewing, and some really crisp views of the nights sky. They also have long eye relief (77m at 1,000m or 231ft at 1,000yds)

The only disadvantage is that they are a little heavy to hold, but these would excel when mounted on a tripod using an L type bracket.

UPDATE

I have now managed to get a large L-Type adaptor and have easily added these binoculars to a tripod and even though it is difficult to describe what you can see with them, here is an image of the Moon, taken with a Canon 400D SLR camera pointed through one of the binocular eyepieces.

I also managed to see Jupiter again in Summer 2008 using them, and amazingly enough they allowed me to see the disc of the planet and make out Jupiter’s Moons as stars.

Astronomy Binocular Specifications

• Model: TP 15 x 70 Astronomy Binoculars 
• Lens: 70mm
• Magnification: 15x
• Weight: 1.3kg
• Supplier: Telescope Planet
• Price (at 19th April 2008): £79

Buy these 15 x 70 Astronomy Binoculars from Telescope Planet.

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