Telescope Platform Posts

After much research, and a few phone calls to the helpful friendly folks at Highpoint Scientific , my first rig was on order! Within a week I had everything I needed to start doing astrophotography. But of course, I had no real clue how to actually do ANY of it. I barely knew how to put the pieces together much less make them work. This was the start of my journey.

I was still learning to use the main rig, when I soon made my first modification. I was doing the Polar Alignment the old fashioned way - using an illuminated polar scope. This caused me to kneel down on the driveway and look up through the polar axis. This was killing my knees, my back and my neck! I hated it and I was sure I was not getting very good alignments with it…..

During August and September I was out shooting every clear night. I had learned a lot of things but I was also noticing several issues that were causing me problems as I did more imaging. I decided to do something to address those issues….

During the Summer of 2020, whilst stuck at home because of Covid I became very in improving the automation of the platform and achieving a more precise framing of the shots I made…

For Christmas of 2020, my wife gave me a neat little wide field scope - the Sharpstar 61EDPHII! This little scope came with a Reducer/Flattener and would make a great wide field Astrograph. So I thought about how to use it.

I was very excited to get the ZWO ASI2600MM-Pro camera a while back. I ordered it when it was announced and then prepared to wait a long time to get it. When I did get it - I decided to put it onto the AP130 platform. That meant that I could move the ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro, along with its filter wheel over to my William Optics Platform. This now means that all of the platforms have been moved over to a mono camera and my ZWOASI924MC-Pro is now not in use.

Version 4.0 of the Williams Optics 132mm platform is a major upgrade that involves adding a new 2600 series mono camera, a new 7x36mm EFW and filters, and a new WO Flattener and 0.8X Reducer that will support the larger format sensor and covert the scope to a much faster f/5.5 system.

This post documents the changes and discusses how I planned this change and how it was executed.

Version 2.0 of my Askar FRA400 Platform consists of a switch in mounts! I have gone from an IOptron CEM26 mount to a new ZWO AM5 Harmonic Drive! This post documents and discusses this change in the platform.

This is my third telescope platform - this one is specifically designed for portability and travel.

The portable scope platform is supposed to be, well, portable. That means light and compact. In determining how to pack this platform for travel, I realized that the finder scope mounting rings made no sense in this application and I changed them out with something both more rigid and compact - the William Optics 50mm base-slide ring set.

After doing manual camera rotations to achieve the compositional framing that I plan - using SGP’s Framing and Mosaic Wizard - I finally decided to add a Camera Rotator to this rig to automate the rotation between objects and when getting flat cal frames for images shot with a specific camera rotation. While I had the rig apart, I re-tensioned the declination belt on the mount to reduce declination backlash.