With blue sky showing between the clouds I thought I may be in with a chance of setting up the scope. I had to wait until 22:45 before Polaris appeared though, so until then wasn’t able to polar align.

As soon as I’d completed a 3 star alignment the mount happily slewed from object to object but with poor collimation I wasn’t able to make out much other than some stars which I used to test the goto.

One of the things I wanted to do this evening was mount my Fuji S9500 on the scope and see if I could take a long exposure at maximum zoom. The camera will take a 30 second exposure when used in manual mode and I used a cable release and 2 second delay to allow me to take the shots without introducing vibrations into the camera or mount.

I was impressed with the number of stars that were detected and I’m still working through the images to find the faintest by comparing them to Starry Night. At the moment I’ve found stars to magnitude 9.96 but I’m sure that as I tweak the exposure in photoshop I’ll find more. I was hoping to get a blur of M51, but I’ve identified the stars around where it should be and there’s no sign. The fuji uses a CCD which should be more sensitive than the Canon CMOS sensor which is commonly used for astro work, but the Canon can achieve a much longer exposure which more than makes up for this.

I must remember next time to set the Fuji to iso400 or higher and also to shoot in raw mode which should give me more flexibility with the processing. This shot was taken at iso100 and shot as a JPEG.

A bank of cloud rolled in at around midnight and I went inside to download the images from the camera in the hope that by then the sky would have cleared. At 00:45 I decided that the session was over and packed everything up. After taking the tube into the house I didn’t want to wake the neighbours by dismantling the mount so carried the whole lot, weight and all, into the living room. The mount, tripod and counter-weights must weigh about 40Kgs (90lb in old money) and being both an awkward shape and top heavy it’s a little tricky to get through doorways. Mental note: take it apart next time!

I’ve invested in an EQ-6 Pro Mount to help me keep my camera’s pointing in the right direction (see the Equipment page for details).

I took the tube from my Skywatcher 250 Dobsonian and added tube rings to allow it to be mounted on the EQ. I’ve left the dob bearings in place as the dob mount makes a handy stand for the tube when its not in use. The 2 counter-weights that ship with mount are not enough to balance the 10″ tube so I added a 5Kg body building weight that I picked up for £4 from the local supermarket.

I had a few problems with the alignment at first but that was down to trying to use on a cloudy night when I couldn’t do more than a 1 star alignment. As soon as I carried out a 3 star alignment the mount worked fine. I found the Polar Finder very useful for getting the scope polar aligned as I was a bit confused by all the conflicting instructions on the Internet and in the manual. For example the manual says use the upper numbers on the RA setting circle, but instructions online say use the lower numbers.