part 1 is somewhere
After trying to get wide angle shots to work with the 18-200mm lens by stacking them I quickly discovered that a zoom lens tends to have abjurations. Essentially, that is a lens distortion on the outer corners of the picture. No matter how sharp and defined the stars were at the center, the outsides had these irritating shapes that looked similar to camera shake. I needed to go with a fixed lens length, a wider lens or maybe just a higher quality lens. Wider AND more quality was our choice. Enter the Tokina 11-18mm f/2.4. This is about as wide as you can get without going fisheye. It gathers so much light that the city glow kicks in before you can see the milky way. Need to go to a darker place...
Then came the Vixen 130sf. I picked up the Optical Tube Assembly (OTA) for $160 from Woodland Hills Telescope. Felt good to buy local, and they have great customer service too. I tried to mount it on my camera tripod but it was just too skakey. I tried craigslist and scored a used equatorial mount. Baytronix is a terrible trash scope but the mount is not disasterous. Far more sturdy than the tripod but still sorta wobbly.
Then I picked up a T-adapter for the D60 but the camera is pretty heavy for the lightweight OTA and mount. I started looking for a less weighty camera to use. Found that in the Canon SL1. It took a long time from spotting the camera until we would buy it. Basically, we waited to see what the features would be on the 7D Mk II.. seeing it was not going to cross over to full-frame I went with the SL1. I know that seems backwards in looking for a lightweight camera then looking at the 7D MkII then going back... basically it was a debate about the next SLR to get.
Next will be a motorized mount. I aim to get the Celestron Advanced VX mount which will run about $700 and a polar alignment scope ~$100. Then I will practice doing short sets of exposures but plan on pointing at bigger celestial objects (other than planets). Andromeda, Orion, Pleadies are in my first goal set. More to come.
Update: 24 October 2014. I purchased three new items to use and try out. I had much debate about the mount I wanted to buy. The Vixen Sphinx Deluxe is currently half off at Woodland Hills Telescope and will likely drop further as they are liquidating their Vixen product support. (of note, there may be a Vixen refractor in my future). Instead, I wanted to buy more items for my objective cost goal. As I successfully sold $1500 for part of my Magic Cards, I am spending it promptly on telescope gear. $800 of that towards the Celestron AVX, another 200 for a light pollution filter via Astronomix EOS Clip-in, and a Vixen Polarie star tracker. This latter item will replace my failed attempts at creating a barn-door tracker.
First light attempt with above said gear is of mixed results. I found out I bought the incorrect filter and this one is specifically for cameras which have been modified to allow the entire light spectrum. As I have not performed this yet, the additional IR filtering may be unwanted. We will see tonight. As far as the Polarie, I could not align it as I had desired- thus more disappointment. At least the AVX mount test was awesome. It requires a car-lighter attachment or use of an external battery pack [which remains unpurchased yet].