SingAstro

I know a lot of folks in my astro club back in the Philippines who have taken great shots with DSLR's. To combat skyglow use an LPR filter. Or limit your exposures, there is an article somewhere on the net which derives the maximum exposure time allowable in urban skies before The Green Horror of sk...

thanks Joyce for the mount. Actually I purchased a Barska 90060 from "True Value Hardware" back in the Philippines this past March (for $200 SGD including 60mm f11 refractor and some horrific eyepieces). This mount is identical.. except for 1) the Orion has a larger counterweight 2) the Or...

I just ordered a ZenithStar 70ED and it arrived at my office today! but I'm still in KL so the courier will come back on Monday.. (I need to pay GST) I noticed that the Megrez 72 costs quite a bit more (about 25%) than the ZS 70ED, but I understand the mechanicals are identical. Both are doublets an...

Kirby, unfortunately that's really how things are :-P But the good news is you can get a decent telescope for less than the price of a 75-300mm lens. Even with no tracking mount, people have gotten good-enough results (e.g. someone on the Philippines yahoogroup I'm a member of, using a P&S digic...

the "Av" mode will be wildly inaccurate, as well.. because the frame is mostly dark (sky) the camera will overexpose Jupiter and you will get a lot of bloom (just like the photo at the start of this thread). Put the camera on manual mode, manual focus, focus it to infinity (may be challeng...

hi Kirby, whether it is a 450D or 500D will not make much difference. Your lens is the 75-300mm, it would be used at 300mm. However you would want to stop it down a bit from f/5.6 say to f/11 in order to use on the center portion of the lens which is sharpest. A 300mm would give about 6X magnificati...

hello, I would like to purchase this mount. I will be back in SG on Saturday.

Please advise...

subject pretty much says it all... Orion is the only place which sells everything I want (EQ-1M, 2" to T-mount, T-mount to Pentax K adapters) but they don't accept non-US billing addresses it seems! buying the parts piecemeal over eekbay would jack up my shipping costs.. anybody got better sugg...

Thanks for the advice. :-) Perhaps I will keep the 10" mirror for now. I was trolling in Digi-Key and found this 1 RPM DC motor for $75 SGD. I think I will retrofit that to my EQ-1 clone and try to do some astrophotography. The EQ-1 clone has horrific PE but am thinking of just using a 200mm le...

has anyone tried doing this with a very cheap mount? e.g. a barn door or similar? I made several barn doors with stepper motor drives but the floppy-drive steppers lack torque. So I got this department store scope with an EQ-1 equivalent mount (Barska 90060). I put aside the 60mm tube with the hope ...