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Challenge: Equatorial Mount for Astrophotography (Computer Controlled?)

Former Member

Hey Ben,

I would love to see you take on the challenge of building a equatorial mount to help ametuer astrophotographers take long-exposure photographs of planets, stars and other deep-space objects such as Galaxy's and Nebulae.

For those who don't know what an 'equatorial mount' is, it is a motorized tripod-mount-thing to cancel the effect of the earths rotation during the exposure time of a DSLR camera with telephoto lens and/or telescope.

Adding computer control could further improve the design by assisting the focusing and positioning of stars etc.

I realize this is a step up from your time lapse trolley imagebut if a challenge like this what to be solved, it would benefit a lot of astrophotographers like myself.

Thanks a lot for your time. (And for making an awesome channel on electronic DIY projects)

Liam

 

 

EDIT: Picture and Caption Below, Few Grammatical and caption updates

 

image

Picture (Above): A Picture taken from a fixed tripod of the night sky. Exposure time:30 seconds. If you look closely, you will notice that the stars are slightly elongated; this is motion blur due to the earths rotation, having a equatorial mount wont only eliminate these spoils in the photographs, but will also allow for longer exposure times, and a deeper, clearer view into space. The two orange lights on the horizon are (from left to right), a city 30 minutes away and a town 10 minutes away.

Parents

  • There is software called Stellarium that I believe you could hook up to a controller. I once looked into it but not into much detail, ,maybe you can use that to send the rotation control signal and the you can process that and send it to your motors to get the required rotation. Would love to hear if you can get this to work would make star photography so much easier and cheaper than using a prebuilt solution.

     

    Hope that helps

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  • There is software called Stellarium that I believe you could hook up to a controller. I once looked into it but not into much detail, ,maybe you can use that to send the rotation control signal and the you can process that and send it to your motors to get the required rotation. Would love to hear if you can get this to work would make star photography so much easier and cheaper than using a prebuilt solution.

     

    Hope that helps

Children