Astrophotography

Visit to Panther Observatory in Wildon

In April 2011 our informal Astrophotography meeting was held at the Panther Observatory of Johannes Schedler. He is one of the world's top amature astrophotographers, just check out his site at www.panther-observatory.com

I had read and heard an awful lot about this man and for me it was a pleasure to at long last meet him. He was a very freindly and generous host and took time to both show his most recent photos and explain how the were taken. The highlight of the evening was to see a demonstration of his new ASA DDM85 Direct Drive Mount. This was a piece of superb engineering - he simply turned on his laptop, clicked on a tiny, unknown galaxy and took a 10s picture, it was bang in the middle of the frame. He then went on to photograph another Galaxy, M106, for 200s WITHOUT guiding ! The result was incredible, perfect stars. He later sent me this "single" shot and I could compare it to an almost identicle one I took last year and to my completed picture with over 1 hour of exposure. His single shot was almost as good as my long exposure ( with guiding, with my setup 200s without would simply be unthinkable ).

I returned home at 2 am, fully motivated and then took the photo shown below of M82.

In the following weeks, I gave a great deal of thought to actually purchasing the smaller DDM60, but after considerable research and discussions with members of the Astronomical Society, I opted to purchase a hungarian mount, the new Friction Drive G53F from Gemini. This mount, although physically the same size as my CGE can carry almost double the payload, is far more accurate and should theoreticallly be almost indestructable.