EAA and Outreach : Using the LP-Guide colour camera
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A later development was the acquisition of the ProStar LP-Guide autoguiding / planetary imaging colour camera. This introduced colour into the equation. Although not as intrinsically light sensitive as the GStar-Ex this light weight camera did have the ability to take long exposure images and so its reach for deep sky targets was only limited by the tracking accuracy of the telescope mount. It is not really practical to autoguide when conducting outreach sessions due to the need to recalibrate the autoguiding software each time that a new target object is selected. And that can be quite time consuming. Therefore one has to rely solely on the accuracy of the mount's motorised R.A. drive. For this reason there was a practical exposure time limit of two minutes when the EQ3-2 mount was used. Longer exposures of 4 minutes and over could be achieved if the more expensive HEQ5 Pro mount was used. But for those longer unguided exposures to work well the mount did need to be quite precisely polar aligned. The recently acquired PoleMaster unit proved to be invaluable in that respect. Click the PoleMaster button for more details. The software that came bundled with this little colour camera was quite versatile and allowed captured images to be enhanced for better viewing by visitors. Click the Technique button for more details. Click the Images button to the right for examples of what visitors could see using this camera.
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