AstroJunk (AJ) brings you the best of the Australian night skies using a monster telescope and some of the world's most sensitive video cameras!
I’m based north west of Brisbane, living on acreage in semi-rural Queensland. This gives me two very important things; a reasonable sky (not dark, but dark enough) and broadband internet – the latter being still quite rare outside of the Australian cities.
My Main Scope is a 20 inch f5 Dobsonian made by SDM telescopes and has a GSTAR-EX video camera attached. This gives a 7x5 arc minute field of view down to about 19th mag on a good night. It tracks the night sky using ServoCat drives and ArgoNavis for it's brain.
The Guide Scope is a Williams Optics Zenithstar 80mm with a GSTAR-EX video camera attached giving a 45x30 arc minute field of view. Even this little scope can pick up Pluto at 14th mag.
On the front of the scope, I have attached a no-name colour Hi-res video camera which uses the glorious Sony HAD-EX chip. The Nose Cam gives nice wide shots of the constellations and sky in colour – but this is not a Mallincam, so don’t set your expectations too high!!
Enjoy the show,
Jonathan.