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DSLR attached to ETX90. LiveView image of 2015 partial eclipse on Canon 40D

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 I try to log my observing and related activities in a regular blog - sometimes there will be a delay but I usually catch up. An index of all my blogs is on the main menu at the top of the page with daily, weekly or monthly views. My Twitter feed is below. I am also interested in photograping wildlife when I can and there is a menu option above to look at some of my images. I try to keep the news feeds from relevant astronomical sources up to date and you will need to scroll down to find these.

The Celestron 14 is mounted on a Paramount ME that I have been using for about 10 years now - you can see that it is mounted on a tripod so is a portable set up. I still manage to transport it on my own and set it all up even though I have just turned 70! It will run for hours centering galaxies in the 12 minute field even when tripod mounted.

 

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Monday
Jan042016

Skywatcher Star Adventurer Portable Setup Part 3 

DateMonday, January 4, 2016 at 7:10AM

No observations today - it was cloudy today and the New Mexico telescopes were very busy. 

Skywatcher Star Adventurer Portable Setup Part 3 

Mount Battery Test

I switched the mount on yesterday morning at 6 a.m. with a fully charged battery. I set the camera to point east. It was still running at midnight having rotated 270 degrees and the camera was now pointing north. So the drive motor will certainly run for 18 hours which means the lightweight battery will last a full night of imaging without any problem. It can then be recharged for the next night's work. I left the mount on and just checked it at 7 a.m. - still going - so it has now lasted 25 hours. I will leave it running and report back. I have certainly solved the problem of powering the mount with minimum weight implications. I finally switched it off at 12 o clock after it had run for 30 hours driving the telescope.

The battery is shown below

 

 

The battery plugs into the Star Adventurer mount as shown below

Here is a closer view that also shows the autoguiding input and the fast/slow buttons and the switch that is set to the northern or southern hemisphere as appropriate. The internal battery cover is shown to the right hand side. This is a bit fiddly but the external battery means I do not have to access the battery compartment.

 

 At a later stage I will test the battery life on the camera I will take a sequence of 30 second shots, storing both jpeg and RAW files for each and see how long the battery lasts. 

To be continued.

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