New imaging rig for CAS Members

For those who missed our training night on Saturday, we are currently building a new imaging rig to teach newcomers to astro imaging with.

Some may be familiar with the Ioptron CEM40 we own and some members have brought along their own equipment to image on.

Committee decided as there is such an interest in imaging right now that we would add some equipment and build up a rig we can use to teach on, but also use on our open nights.

This was assisted by the generous donation by Tyler Bowman of Explore Scientific of a neat ES80 FCD 100 triplet refractor along with the matching 0.7 x reducer.

With that in hand we are in the processing of adding some additional hardware.

Our new rig will consist of:

CEM40 EQ Mount

ES80 FCD 100 + reducer

ZWO ASIAIR Plus imaging computer

ASI294MC Pro cooled imaging camera

30mm guidescope + ASI290MM guide cam

plus some accessories like filter drawer, dual band filter and dew straps etc

I have also donated a Samsung Galaxy A6 tablet for running the ASIAIR application on. We will get a nice protective case for that too,

So overall we will have a fine imaging rig – hopefully everything will be here by next social night or next training night so we can start to teach the basics

Don’t forget we run the training nights even on cloudy/rain evenings – so do come along and see what we are doing and don’t worry that you don’t understand whats going on … we will teach you and demonstrate for you

thanks

Simon