...because it seems there is not alot of Nexstar SE Info out there

The idea for starting my own website/blog came to me when I was looking for information about the Nexstar SE series telescopes on the internet. There are a couple of amateur sites out there (check the list of sites on the left) as well as the official Celestron website but I found that most of these sites were sometimes catered to the seasoned amateur astronomer and were a little difficult for me to understand. So I decided to write down my experience with this telescope so that maybe someone else might benefit from it. Oh - and I don't have any connections to Celestron - I only chose the orange color for the blog since I thought it would go nice with all the pictures of an orange telescope ...

Monday, November 2, 2009

photography setup

Lots of pieces you don't want to drop in the dark...

Due to popular request i took some pictures of how exactly the camera attaches to the telescope. I currently am using the following setups:

  1. Prime Focus method
  2. Eyepiece projection method

Prime focus setup
For this setup i am using the following pieces: a 1.25" adapter that you insert into the "base" of the telescope where usually the diagonal prism would go.(You can use a diagonal prism as well, if you don't want your camera-adapter-rig to point parallel to the telescope, but up at a 90 degree angle). Next comes a T-Ring that screws onto the 1.25" adapter and then i am using an adapter that goes from M42 to Micro 4/3rds, because the T-Ring that i have has the M42 size/dimension and my panasonic is a "Micro 4/3rds" camera. You can get all kinds of T-rings to fit your type of camera. I got mine at www.cncsupplyinc.com. Here's a picture of all the pieces.

So there you have the visual back that usually is attached to the telescope on the very left, then comes the 1.25" adapter with the T-ring already screwed on and then comes the adapter that goes onto the camera.

Eyepiece projection method
This is basically the same setup but you add an additional tube that holds your eyepiece of joice. This tube goes between the camera adapter and the T-ring. The eyepiece is held in place by the little silver screw you can see at the bottom of the image, right in the middle of the tube. Here's a picture how that looks:

This setup gets quite long and if you attach this to the 6SE then you won't be able to point your telescope straight up. Please make sure you set the slew limits correctly. When i first used this setup on my scope i had to hastily turn the power off when i saw that the camera was about the hit the base of the telescope - which probably would have broken or at least bent the whole setup badly...

Here's a picture of all the pieces screwed onto the 6SE:

here's another angle:


So if you want to be able to look straight up, you should use a diagonal prism. I also found that it makes sense to screw the whole assembly together inside in the light and not to take everything outside in pieces. ...I did that the first time and ended up dropping the T-Ring in the grass and it took me 10 minutes to find it again....

So there you have it - it took me some time to find out which pieces are necessary to use your digital SLR for astrophotography. I'm still having a very hard time focusing and deep sky objects don't show up in my viewfinder at all. AND my viewfinder is so bright i'm almost blinded when i try to use it in the dark. But i guess i'll figure all these things out in due time....