about

Established in 2004

I’ve been a visual astronomer for the past 37 years. I’ve ground and polished a number of mirrors in my early years as a bought telescope was way out of my financial reach. 

Growing up at Foxton Beach gave me access to the Nelson Bartlett Observatory, and the large 6″ Cooke refractor. I spent many evenings teaching people twice my age about the night sky, optics and general astronomy, i was lucky to have amazing mentors in Merv Loper and Laurie Morton.

Merv had a particular interest in solar astronomy and grinding and testing optics, Laurie was more interested in the Photography aspect. 

I worked part time up at Cater Observatory and met some amazing people. 

Aaron

The equipment list.

Here is a photo of the ZWO AM5 mounted on the EQ6 Pier. 

I wanted to see how much more accurate the AM5 was compared to the SkyWatcher EQ5 Pro R mount.

That was a very fustrating night ! I have to admit that the AM5 alignment process is not at all as easy as the EQ6, there were some very strong words being used in the yard that night !

ZWO AM5 Harmonic mount mounted to the Sky Watcher pier extension.
PlayerOne Artemis-M Pro Camera

PlayerOne really do make some great cameras, but in the end, most manufactures are using the same CCD’s. So its the “other” things like USB-C, amazing support, and the price point was unbeatable ! The Artemis-M Pro uses the IMX 492 sensor which in 1×1 binning give you 47mp but there is a tradeoff ! 

I recently bought a 16bit Mono camera, and again, its a PlayerOne! This does give an amazing dynamic range, and seem to be much more sensitive than the Artemis-M. it also have a bigger sensor APS size 😉

PlayerOne Poseidon-M Pro Camera
StellarMate Pro

People have said “wow it must take ages to find what you are looking for”, or , “you must know the night sky really well”. Well, I hate to say this, but you don’t need either when you have StellarMate, its brains to the entire system. As you can see I’m not s ZWO shop, I have a mix of gear, so needed something that was going to work with my equipment, i started off with the Raspberry Pi version, but as soon as they released the SMPro it answered all my issues with power cables !

I recently bought this, a CAA, Camera Angle Adjuster, aka as a rotator. This allows me to frame the object. This comes in handy when I’m capturing data over periods of months.

ZWO CCA
Capture Train

This is what it all looks like attached to the Telescope. on the bottom left of the image you can see the ZWO focuser.

Here is a short video of the CAA in action.

PlayerOne Cere's Guide Camera

Playerone Ceres-M guide camera. This replaces the ZWO ASI 120mm which i managed to kill crashing the scope into the leg of the tripod !  Ive always had great service from Playerone !  So it was an easy choice on what to replace it with 😉