Astrophotography
First, a bit of my background in astronomy and astronomy equipment...
I have always had access to a telescope. Early, I had use of a vintage 1960's Criterion RV-6 Dynascope like the one in the ad below. This telescope was a classic Newtonian reflector mounted on a German Equatorial Mount (GEM) with electric clock drive. (Click on the image to display the full-sized ad.)
In 1993, I purchased a Celestron C5 for purely visual use. This 5" catadoptric telescope uses the popular Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope (SCT) design that allow manufacturers to easily mass produce scopes with spherical mirrors. (As opposed to the harder and more expensive to produce parabolic mirrors of the Newtonian class of scope.) The corrector plate of the SCT refracts the in-coming light slightly to "correct" abberations caused by the spherical mirror. The Celestron C5 (actually a C5+) is shown below:
Then, in 2003, anxious to get a GOTO scope and looking for more light-gathering power, I purchased another SCT, the Celestron NexStar 8i. With the computerized hand controller, I gained the ability to rapidly and accurately slew to over 40,000 celestial objects including the Revised NGC catalog, the Messier catalog, the IC Catalog, and the Caldwell catalog. As shown in the photo below, the Celestron N8i sits on an altitude-azimuth mount and so is capable of only short exposures of relatively bright objects such as the Moon, the Sun, and the more conspicuous planets.
The next step in my evolution into astrophotography was to purchase a Philips ToUcam Pro II web camera. Using this relatively inexpensive webcam, I was able to photograph the brighter objects of the Solar System including the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. Although not specifically designed for this purpose, this webcam is particularly suited to astrophotography due to its use of a sensitive CCD light detector. (Most other webcams are designed around a cheaper, less expensive, and less sensitive CMOS detector.) A photo of the Philips ToUcam Pro II is shown below:
My next move was to look for a GOTO capability for my 5" Celestron. For this capability, I purchased a refurbished Meade LXD-55 GEM from Ebay's Meade factory outlet store and was immediately impressed with Meade's firmware upgradable hand controller. (There is no update capability for the Celestron N8i hand controller.) With the latest firmware update to the Autostar 497 hand controller and after performing a "hypertune", the LXD-55 was capable of a three-star alignment which dramatically improved the mount's pointing accuracy.
With the C5 scope / LXD55 mount setup, I started experimenting with deep sky photography using a used Starlight Xpress MX7C camera. A photo of this camera is shown below:
This "one shot" camera is capable of capturing full color photos in a single exposure using on-chip filters to collect the color data simultaneous with the luminance data. Although this combination of scope / mount / camera worked well and advanced me along the learning curve, several factors limited my ability to capture deep space images of the quality that I was looking for. Chief among these factors was 1) the scope's apeture was too small, 2) the mount could not track accurately enough and had no guiding capability and 3) the camera was not sensitive enough to overcome the local light pollution of my primary site. To correct these inadequacies I purchased my current setup: Celestron 8" SCT scope, Takahashi EM-200 Temma 2 mount, and SBIG ST-8XME camera (with SBIG CFW-10 filter wheel and Astrodon E-series Tru-Balance LRGB filters). More details regarding my current setup can be found on the Astrophotography Equipment web page in this section.