It might be interesting with which equipment all these pictures are capured. So, lets have a look at some criteria: 1. The mount takes the pictures! Sounds weird, but if your mount is weak, no big telescope or camera can help. So, have a look that your mount is a bit oversized. 2. Have a look at other astrophotographers setup! Who has a compareable imaging site, same budget? A good way might be, to take a step back at the telscopes and cameras size and take care of getting everything stable and reproduceable. I want to give you a short overview of what I used in the past and what is my actual setup. 1. I started with the club’s mount and telescope, which were an “Alt AD6”-mount and a “Lichtenknecker flatfield camera”, also called “FFC” with 6” f/3.5. Guiding was done with a little refractor and a Meade DSI II. I started using a DSLR and after a few months, I switched to a Mono-CCD. 2. One year later I got the chance to move to my “own” place at the observatory and a friend borrowed me his WAM 650move mount. Also, the telescope changed to a 5” f/5 Newtionian by Skywatcher. I pimped the mount with a telescope drive master and that setup was quite stable and I had a lot of fun with it. 3. In summer 2013, I decided to build an observatory together with my friend Günter Kerschhuber. I had the wish to run that remotely and for that, I wanted to buy a new, ultimate mount. So I bought a ASA DDM60pro mount, which is produced by the Austrian manufacturer ASA (Astro systems Austria). This was the point of matter for me, because I can talk to them in German and the company is only a few miles away from my hometown. On this mount, I actually run two telescopes simultaneously: a 10” f/4 Newtonian with a SBIG ST2000XM for luminance and a 5” f/5 Newtonian for the RGB frames (Starlight express SXV-H9 camera). So I can do luminance and RGB simultaneously and double my exposure time – this is a big advantage!

Equipment