It will take a few posts to go through my entire astro-imaging rig, but for now here is a brief rundown of the outdoor setup. I will write some additional posts later that explain the control system that I use to run everything.

My setup has gone through many iterations, but in it’s current form I have two basic configurations, with two different optical tubes. Everything else except for the optical tube is common between the two configurations.

Starting from the ground up, the mount is an Astro-Physics Mach 1 GTO equatorial mount. The particular model that I have includes the azimuth micro-adjuster but has the GTOCP3 control box rather than the newer  GTOCP4.

The main camera is an older model QSI583, with the wsg option that allows for off-axis guiding an includes an integrated filter wheel. The newer QSI600 series cameras include 8-position filter wheels, but since this is the older model with a 5-position filter wheel, I have two interchangeable carousels, one with Astrodon Gen-II Series E Luminance, Red, Green and Blue filters and one with narrowband H-alpha, Oxygen-III and Sulphur-II filters.

For autoguiding I have a Starlight Xpress Lodestar-X2, recently upgraded from an Orion StarShoot autoguider that I had previously used for many years. The Lodestar is much, much more sensitive and makes autoguiding setup significantly easier.

My long focal length setup uses a Celestron EdgeHD 11 optical tube with a Celestron 0.7x focal reducer. As a result, I have an image scale of a little under 0.5 arcseconds per pixel. My short focal length setup uses a Takahashi FSQ-106, giving me an image scale of around 2 arcseconds per pixel and a wide field of view, with the diagonal being over 2 degrees.