I’ve been wanting to get a new telescope mount for years – something that tracks better for taking astro pictures. Of course, I would go online from time to time and window-shop at the high-end professional mounts – but I don’t have the five-figures to spend on one or even enough sky to make use of it if I did!

I’ve been eyeing the Celestron CGE line for a while and was doing some price comparisons recently. The DX model was listed for under $2000 at all the sites I checked, including a major on-line retailer I frequent. That was too good to resist so I just had to click on Buy!

I’ve also been tinkering with an old telescope I have since it looked to be a good match for my Canon DSLR – an Orion SkyView 6″ Newtonian. I think it’s a great first telescope and I’ve always found the views to be quite crisp – especially after getting a decent right-angle mirror and an eyepiece or two..

When I tried attaching my Canon 450D to the scope I found it could not quite reach focus. Not surprising as the focal plane on these is usually pretty close in to the tube. I had a focuser I had bought for this scope and never got around to putting on, so I removed the old one, drilled holes to bring the new one in a little closer. I also had to drill out a new CGE dovetail plate to mount it, but then was good to go!

I have a nice solar filter for this scope I got for watching the Christmas Solar Eclipse in 2000, so I thought I would try this out first on the Sun. Here’s the setup:

The CGE mount will let you align on the Sun if you enable that option in the setup. So I angled the mount to point roughly North and ran a Solar System alignment on the Sun. The display prompts to center the object in the finderscope, which I didn’t have on of course. So I did a rough pointing by looking at the shadow cast by the telescope tube and then the hinges of the tube rings. That was enough to center the Sun in the eyepiece (with a filter on the telescope of course!) and then confirmed the alignment. The mount tracked quite well East to West but needed a little nudge to the North from time to time, but this was good enough to get some pictures!

Visual observation showed one little sunspot on the visible surface, so it was a pretty boring sun photo – but it worked! I tried taking pictures at various exposure from 1/125 though 1/500. I just took the photo directly through the camera after viewing the histogram on the camera display, without any remote software. I pressed the shutter button manually and re-focused at each shot and a few of these came out OK. Here’s an example:

One feeble spot is pretty clearly visible at the bottom center.

The 6″ Newt is an f5 at 750 mm focal length. We can calculate the field of view using [Covington, Astrophotography for the Amateur]:

FOV = 206,265″ X array-size(mm) / FL(mm)

With an array of 22.2 x 14.8 mm and a focal length of 750mm that works out to 6105 x 4070 arcsec or 102 x 68 arc min. Not bad!

With a width of 4070 arc seconds and 4272 pixels, that works out to 1.4 arcsec / pixel. Seems this is classically considered a good match, though perhaps it depends on what one wants to take pictures of. In any case, this should be a nice setup for brighter wide-field objects, so there will be plenty of things to try to catch.