Home > Equipment
| Telescopes / Binoculars: | |
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My latest purchase (Jan. 2008)
is a
Celestron 11 XLT on a
Losmandy G-11 mount!
The C11 will be the successor of the C8 for high resolution planetary imaging. This system is really BIG! When I assembled all the components it got bigger and bigger, but I think it is still portable. The telescope is waiting for first light and to be tested on the stars. I keep my fingers crossed that the optics is fine! Edit: First light was successful! The telescope was slightly out of collimation but after fixing that, it performed as expected. Click here for some pictures... |
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I also use a Celestron 8 SCT
(203mm/2030 mm) on a
Vixen Great Polaris German mount.
The mount has electrical drive in both axis. For long exposure imaging I have a 60/700mm refractor guiding telescope from Celestron. |
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I was able to catch one of the
last
Takahashi FS 102 N refractors (since this telescope
is discontinued by Takahashi). The FS is an air spaced doublet fluorite Apochromat (Fraunhofer design). The front lens is made of CaF2, a synthetic grown calcium fluorite mono crystal with excellent optical performance. Aperture is 102mm, focal length is 820mm (f/8). The picture on the left also shows a 2" diagonal mirror and a 6mm Vixen LV eyepiece. |
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The fourth instrument is the
Zeiss Diascope 85 T* FL on an azimuth mount and photo tripod.
The scope is a 5
lens "Super Achromat" with Zeiss T* coating. The term
"FL" is a little bit confusing since Zeiss is not using
CaF2. The optical system consists of a special sort
of extra low dispersion glass (FPL-53) which contains
fluorite ions.
I mainly use this instrument for visual observations. It is very portable and delivers considerable performance on deep-sky, but also on the moon and planets due to the high contrast and fine optics. Aperture is 85 mm in diameter, focal length is 502mm (f/5.9). |
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I also use the Zeiss Victory 8x42 T* FL binocular to travel through the Milky way. |
| Photo: Courtesy Carl Zeiss AG | |
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Cameras |
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I just started some experiments with a
DMK 21AF04.AS camera (The Imaging Source)
together with a filter wheel and
L-RGB filters from Astronomik. The camera is used for high resolution planetary imaging. The picture on the left shows the cam after a "cool" night of imaging, you can see the following configuration: Back of my C8 and then a 2" visual back, a 1.25" reducer, Televue 3x Barlow lens, Atik Filter Wheel, T-Thread adaptor and DMK 21AF04.AS camera. The camera is connected to the Laptop via Firewire (IEE 1394) which is a high speed connection allowing a maximum of 60 fps. |
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For planetary imaging I also use a
Philips ToUCam Pro 740K
web cam together with a Toshiba Satellite 2410 Notebook. This is a very simple, but excellent planetary camera. I've had some great results with this cam. |
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My latest camera-purchase: The Canon
EOS 400D. The CMOS sensor has a resolution of 10.1 mega pixels. I will mainly use it for deep sky imaging... Waiting for first light! |
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The Canon T70 SLR is an analog
film camera. I took my first astro images with it. |
| My observing site is in Germany at N 51°50' and E 09°08' approx. 150 m above sea level. | |
