After months of inactivity, I finally got around to plugging the SynScan hand controller into the EQ6 and powering everything up. No bangs, flashes or fizzles with trails of wispy smoke! Everything worked.

I used to use a car battery to power my old Skysensor 2000/GP DX mount but I bought an Observatory Power Supply to use with the EQ6 as I thought it might be more of a drain on a battery.

Last night, I used the mount for the first time, doing a 3-star alignment. While only the first star was in my Vixen VC200L’s field of view when the scope slewed to an alignment position, stars were easily placed at the centre of the field of view using the hand paddle. Once all three stars had been confirmed, the hand paddle indicated that alignment was poor. However, slewing to various objects did put them in the field of view, so alignment wasn’t that bad after all.

During the start and end of slewing, on both axes, the gears sound like their grinding. It’s quite noisy for a second or two but I don’t know if this is normal behaviour for an EQ6. Otherwise, it’s very quiet.

With everything working, I decided to try a little astrophotography. I mounted my unmodified Canon 350D on the ‘scope (the camera was bolted to the scope directly rather than using a ball and socket mount), and took a couple of quick pics before the camera battery died to see how good the tracking was. The results are below (nice round stars). Both images suffered from severe skyglow so I darkened the images in PhotoShop to make them more visually appealing. Click the images for an enlarged view.

Image 1: Handle of the Plough. ISO 100, approx. 3 minute exp. f/5.6, 18mm focal length. No filters (click image for enlarged view):

Image 2: Base of the Handle of the Plough. ISO 100, approx. 3 minute exp. f/5.6, 55mm focal length. No filters (click image for enlarged view):

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Filed under: My Personal Astronomy Blog