20070525 Evaluation of Meade DSX mount

It's a partially clear night after a series of cloudy nights. Seeing is no good, transparency is pretty great but cloud are floating around, making serious imaging impossible.

I setup my DSX mount to evaluate whether it's suitable for imaging or not. I bought it for remote solar observation and so it's important for me to see if it's good or not. My first attempt to use this mount is with Meade DS electronic focuser, but later found that most of these mounts are faulty for that port (I tried two of them), and so I gave up. But this time, I have a NGF-S driven by Shoestring FCUSB and thus it's independent of the mount's electronics.

GOTO is pretty accurate, even to the moon. So, it's great for remote operations. Tracking is fine to the eyes, but on imaging, you can see it's actually shaking. I did it at 325mm at prime focus with a DMK 31AF03. I'd say it's marginally acceptable for this setting. Here's the result:-



It's pretty blur indeed, but marginally acceptable somehow, if you're not very demanding.

I pushed it up with a 2x and the blur is too much, I didn't even try to take any shot with this configuration.

I'd say, I'd want an even lower power scope with this setup remotely, to avoid those shake.