Instruments
Well, instrument singular at the moment really.
I have an 0.25m pier mounted Meade LX200 Classic OTA on an EQ6 mount. It is permanently fixed on an 8" steel pier which is attached to a 1 cubic meter concrete block under the ground. This block is isolated from the rest of the foundations of the observatory to reduce vibration. I have to say that this has been very successful and very little vibration affects imaging. I made the pier myself to a very heavy specification. The OTA and guidescope are mounted to the EQ6 via a custom cradle made from aluminium to avoid any flexure that could affect guided imaging. I use a 4" guide scope to ensure that I always have a guide star available without having to repoint the imaging scope.
I drive the mount using planetarium software via the free EQMOD interface, this works very well and allows for very accurate slews. Periodic error is slightly more of an issue (±20arcsec) but is virtually eliminated through autoguiding with the QHY5 guide camera.
The imaging CCD is a QHY6Pro device, it features a Sony ExView 1/2" chip with 795 x 595 pixels. It is quite a sensitive little chip with peak QE of 68% @620nm and 62%QE at Ha.
The camera has set point cooling using a solid state thermoelectric cooler and fan. I typically image at -10°C. in the summer and -15°C in the winter.
The optical train is set up to be imaging at f5.5, this gives me an image scale of around 1.2 arcsec/pix. Analysis of image data indicates that average seeing conditions are typically FWHM of ~ 3".
The mount and CCD are both controlled by PC. As I have to work for a living this means that I can set it all going and collect many hours worth of data in a night whilst asleep and still be in a fit state to work the next day.
The sensitivity of the system for a typical 210sec image can be seen in the plot below.
Software
I use Astrometrica for most data reduction with Peranso for lightcurve fitting. They are both very fine and capable software packages which I would highly recommend.
I use EQASCOM (part of the EQMOD) project to control the mount.
I use the free planetarium software C2A which is excellent. It is able to access VizieR to populate deep field images with star data from th USNO-B0 catalogue. It also provides positions for asteroids and comets plus is able to control the mount via the ASCOM interface to EQASCOM.
