Encouraged by the good lunar results on the first testing of the f/10 Meade RB-70 air-spaced doublet refractor I removed the scope from the rings within which it had been mounted when it was used as a guide scope some 13 years ago. A small dovetail bar was fitted so that the scope would be parallel to the declination axis of the mount rather than in the arbitrary alignment determined by the guide mounting rings. This is essential for GOTO to be able to send the scope reasonably accurately to an object.
The AVX mount was placed on marks on the ground which quickly gives quite a good polar alignment if care is taken with the placement of the tripod feet.
An SV705C OSC uncooled CMOS camera fitted with a UV/IR cut filter was placed at the focus of the scope. The mount was controlled by AstroDMx Capture via an INDIGO client and server running on the imaging computer indoors.
Click on any image to get a closer view
The Meade RB-70 mounted on the AVX mount by means of a dovetail bar
AstroDMx Capture sent the scope/mount to Vega and the star was brought to focus using a Bahtinov mask.
The scope showing the Bahtinov mask
The Bahtinov mask focused star
AstroDMx Capture plate-solved the field of view and the scope was sent to M42.
AstroDMx Capture capturing data on M42
With a negative previewTwenty five images of each of 2s, 5s, 15s, 20s, 25s duration were captured and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker. The resulting image was post processed in Fitswork 4 and the Gimp 2.10.
M45 with a Meade RB-70
The scope was then sent to the 92.1 % waning Moon
AstroDMx Capture captured a 1500-frame SER file.
The best 80% of frames in the SER file were stacked in Autostakkert!
The resulting image was wavelet processed in waveSharp
The image was post processed in Gimp 2.10
92.1% waning, gibbous Moon
The Meade RB-70 was significantly improved by fitting the dovetail bar and the scope proved its worth for lunar imaging and even a bright deep sky image, the Orion nebula.
The INDIGO client in AstroDMx Capture worked without issue.
