My New Mount - Skywatcher HEQ5

Anyone, that has read some of my previous posts will know that I sometimes comment on the fact I use "incorrect" equipment for DSLR astrophotography. My main gripe being my mount which isn't very stable, suffers from field rotation and doesn't have the best motors. Basically it is rubbish for astrophotography and I really needed something different.

I have had my eyes on a Skywatcher HEQ5 for quite a while as it seems to be a common choice for astrophotography use and it isn't as heavy as some of the bigger mounts like the NEQ6. My version of choice was the HEQ5 Syntrek which is basically the HEQ5 Pro SynScan without the GOTO handset. I basically didn't need the handset as I already have one with my Alt-Az mount plus I plan to use a laptop in the future when using the mount for astrophotography.

However, when looking at some online sites I noticed that there was comments about the Syntrek version being discontinued which horrified me as I didn't want to pay circa £130 more for a handset I didn't need! This meant that my planned Christmas present was now a May Bank Holiday present and I quickly snapped up the last one. After buying it, the mount was actually deleted from First Light Optics' website within 15 minutes!

I have had lots of fun in the kitchen already with it including attaching it to the laptop and controlling it with an Xbox 360 gamepad. All I need now is a nice clear night to really test it out including an attempt at some long exposure photography.

Mercury

In April, Mercury appeared in our sky at a point where I was actually able to observe it for at least 30 minutes each night. I was pretty chuffed to see it as it meant that I had now been able to observe all the planets in the Solar System. However, I decided that I wanted to try and capture an image of it as well.

First up with a widefield shot which was pretty easy to capture. I actually have several now but the picture I took at Harperrig is my favourite and that is they one I am including in this blog post.

The colour of the sky due to the setting sun is wonderful as it is, but seeing Mercury shining near the horizon just adds to the image in my opinion.

Of course, I also had to try and capture the planet with my telescope, which wasn't as easy due to the lack of alignment stars. There was a fair bit a manual intervention involved in getting the telescope on target but I managed it, even if I only had about 15 minutes of time to then capture something.

To be honest, it isn't very good. The atmospheric disturbance was terrible due to how low in the horizon Mercury is and I struggled to even capture what I did. One nice thing is that you can tell the planet has a slight phase as it isn't exactly circular in shape but beyond that I can't say it is that interesting.

Recent Photography Fun at Harperrig Reservoir

So, over the last couple of months as the evenings grew longer I have tried to get along to Harperrig Reservoir as much as possible. Whilst I do use my telescope for visual astronomy I have also been leaving my DSLR set up on a fixed tripod taking the odd image. I wanted to share two of them with everyone here as I like both of them.

The first is one image from the several hundred that I took on the night that the Lyrid meteor shower peaked. This is the one meteor I actually captured with the camera, I saw quite a lot that night but none of them wanted to occur in my camera's field of view. In fact the rather weak meteor I did capture was the last image I took that night so it was pretty lucky that I caught anything.

Next up is a Star Trail image I took on another night by taking 93 x 30 second exposures and then merging them together. I managed to get Polaris pretty close to the centre of the image which was a nice bonus. In the future I hope that I can maybe get some star trails with fixed scenery as they tend to make the nicest images.

I took a lot more images over the night of late Spring but the two above are my favourite. I now need to try and improve on them in future sessions.