Astrophotography Help

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cokecan72

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Martin
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Hi Guys

I'm interested in having ago at some wide-field, long exposure astrophotography without trails but have a few questions:

I've recently acquired a Skywatcher EQ2 mount/tripod which I believe should suit my needs fairly well from a beginner on a budget's point of view. I intend to fit it with one of the single-axis DC motors so I can set it up to "track" the night sky once polar aligned for star-trail free shots.

This is where I start to get a bit lost. The EQ2 didn't come with a telescope, it's literally just the mount/tripod so I was planning on buying an adapter plate to mount my Canon 450D to it. Now I've seen that it is possible to polar align with just this (possibly using live view?) but comments I've read suggest its fairly tricky, not to mention potentially inaccurate. With this in mind I think I'd feel a bit more comfortable using a polar scope/finder to do this, but I'm not sure how to mount the polar scope/finder to the EQ2?

Does the polar scope/finder need to be in a specific position in relation to the mount or can I simply buy something like the ADM dual plate to mount my camera on one side and the polar scope on the other? Would a hot-shoe compatible finder be another alternative and just stick to the adapter plate for the camera?

Any help from would be greatly appreciated :)

Thanks
 
Thanks for the reply. I have posted on Astronomyforum.net too but I know there are a few on here that do astrophotography so figured I'd ask anyway :)
 
You need to have a word with Sara (Swag72 on here), Martin. She's posted some great astro shots and seems to be the resident expert in this field.
 
Head on over to POTN, plenty helpful people for astro wortk on their forums.
 
You need to Polar align the mount, not the camera. I'm not sure if a polar scope can be fitted to an eq2 or not.

You may find you can get reasonable widefield exposures with a very rough polar align with the dec axis simply pointing north. One of the legs may be labelled north. (It is on an eq3)

As suggested above SGL is an excellent resource.
 
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