I’m still struggling to get my big old scope to reproduce some of the behaviour of my smart scope. I won’t bore you with the endless rounds of incompatible software versions, missing drivers, missing star catalogues, multiple connection issues etc. etc. etc. Suffice to say that, after several months of mostly trial and error, everything nearly works. I can control the telescope from inside the house. The computer can compare the stars the camera sees with the stars it ought to see and move the telescope accordingly – a technique called “plate solving”.

My big problem at the moment is that, once the telescope reaches its target it tends to wander off somewhere. The photos from this aren’t very good. This one, of the Dumbbell Nebula is about the best of a bad bunch. Notice that the stars have diffraction spikes on them because this was taken with a reflecting telescope rather than a refractor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbbell_Nebula

The smart scope, on the other hand, allows me to explore a wide variety of photographic techniques. This, for example is the Triangulum Galaxy. At 2.7m light years away, it’s part of the Local Group that include the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way. It’s a bit smaller than those two and can fit in a single frame of the smart scope.

The interesting thing about this image is that it was taken over several nights, each with a couple of hours exposure. Astrophotography has its own image file format that stores things like the coordinates and orientation in the sky of the photograph. This allows the images over different nights to be much more easily combined with one another. Notice – no diffraction spikes this time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulum_Galaxy

This same storage format also makes it easier to build mosaics of nearby bits of the sky. This picture of the Seven Sisters is actually a composite of two nearby frames. The whole cluster won’t fit in the smart scope’s field of view. But that’s no problem. Just photograph one bit then move the scope a little bit and photograph the next bit. The storage of coordinates makes it easy for software to combine the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades

I would love to sit up all night watching images appear on the smart scope. Unfortunately I have to sleep sometime. And sometimes the best bit of the sky appears exactly when I want to go to bed. The smart scope comes to the rescue once again. I can tell the scope to wait until a given time, and then spend a specified period photographing a named object. You can even give it a whole list of things, times and exposures, then just go to bed and let it do all the work. This photograph of M15, the Great Globular Cluster in Pegasus, was taken using just this technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_15

I’ve got a very long way to go before I can get my old scope to emulate all these techniques.

All of the above photos were taken this week from my garden in Southend. The first with a Skywatcher Heritage 150p (6 inch reflector) and a ZWO ASI485MC camera. The rest with a Seestar S50 smart scope (2 inch refractor)