After posting a snap of my new widefield astrophotography setup on Facebook there was a question about how it was mounted. I thought that if there is one who is interested, there are probably more people out there considering similar questions. Thus, we will take a quick look at a way to mount a widefield camera and a guide camera side-by-side on the Sky-Watcher HEQ5 german equitorial mount.
The Samyang 135mm f/2 manual telephoto lens is an excellent widefield telescope, or so the forums say. It is a super-fast 67.5mm aperture telescope at f/2. We find it mounted on my modified Canon EOS 600D with a Baader Planetarium UV/IR astrophoto filter instead of the normal IR filter. In addition we can use the brilliant clip-in narrow-band filters for H-alpha, OIII and SII to get some of the functionality of a proper astronomical CCD camera. To this we add the 50mm Orion guide scope with a StarShoot autoguider.
The autoguider is mounted on an accessory bracket with a block for mounting on photographic tripods that has a standard tripod mounting hole on the bottom. The bracket and mounting block came with the telescope. Then we can just screw the camera and guider to either side of a standard Vixen dovetail bar. Finally we mount all of that ontop of a computer-controlled Sky-Watcher HEQ5 because: Stability!
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