Piggy Back Mount Position

[Radar]

It's 6.15a.m, I have just got back from a night of shooting the night sky (no knocking off around 1a.m for this crazy film guy).

Anyway, I was road testing a new lens last night. I wanted to compare it to another lens I had, so I decided to get two cameras riding piggyback at the same time. Anyway, turns out I'd left one of my piggyback gizmo's at home, so I had no proper way of securing the second camera.

So, how's this for genuis?

I got the second camera and sat it on the centre of the mount. Doing this meant that no balancing had to be done, and it's weight could be supported with one bit of gaffa tape.

Now the question is, will this work? Or is there a chance that by being in the centre of the mount it will not track in an arc properly?

I was shooting cygnus which was low on the horizon for this.

Anyway, take a look at the pic and get that Monday morning brain out of low gear by telling me if this has worked or not?

741

I'll have the film developed today and then we'll know for sure.

[omaroo]

Can't quite see the image there Ray, but from what I gather you've taped the camera to a part of the mount that is moving in RA. Given that you manually found your target and taped it there it should be locked in Dec and still move in RA successfully. Should be right, shouldn't it?

[Radar]

Yeah it ended up working. I wasn't sure though, I've read posts before which made me doubt it.

Cheers

Ray

[rogerg]

Very hard to tell from your pic what exactly the camera is resting on, but it was obviously sufficient from your follow up post. I'm guessing you didn't have DEC movement of it though, which would be a problem for higher res stuff. Something I have found interesting is Vixen has (or used to have last time I looked) an adaptor that allow mounting of a camera on the counter-weight shaft. That makes a lot of sense, providing the counter-weight shaft rotates with DEC (which the Losmandy ones do).

Mounted camera's on my scope's in bizzar dodgy ways in the past, but not like that before :thumbsupmate:

Roger.

[Radar]

Something I have found interesting is Vixen has (or used to have last time I looked) an adaptor that allow mounting of a camera on the counter-weight shaft.

That is a handy little invention, I'll look into that.

Cheers

Ray