Equipment

Equipment

The Photon Harvester

The blue pier is a six-foot long concrete-filled 1/4" X 6" steel tube buried four feet in the earth. The tube is set in one half ton of concrete. On the pier sits the wedge, in these pictures a Meade standard equatorial wedge . The telescope, an 8 inch Meade LX200, is bolted to the tilting plate of the wedge. A JMI Next Generation Focusing System (NGFS) motorized Crayford focuser is clamped to the visual back of the telescope. The Charge Coupled Device (CCD) inserted into the focuser is a Starlight Xpress MX5. The camera and scope are controlled by a Prostar 133 MHz laptop. All images in this astrodiary were made from photons harvested by this system, an "entry level" digital imaging package.