TheSkySearchers

I have been looking at a few star tracker camera mounts but with prices between $250 and $500 I had to "put it on the back burner" Then I saw a Meade ETX70, without a controller, on the net selling for about $36 US. The controller is not a problem because I have a spare Autostar so I thought I will give it a go. But it was a lemon: tripod was unusable and all the lenses were removed from the OTA, the seller must have forgotten to mention this! But as the saying goes: when you get lemons make lemonade. After I cleaned the mount inside and got the insects out of the encoders it seem to function fine with my Autostar controller in polar mode and that is what I need to make it a camera tracker. The tripod is also not a problem because I have a old one from a ETX90 that can do polar, all that was left was to modify the OTA to become a camera mount. I did this by making it shorter and mounting a round piece of perspex on the back of it, on this I mounted a Slik ball head camera mount. I Can't wait to try it out!

Anxious to see what you can do with that rig.

Nice set-up.

Neat idea, I have one of those from an ETX-60 gathering dust. New project!

Thanks,
Steve

sdbodin wrote: ↑Mon Sep 14, 2020 5:57 pm Neat idea, I have one of those from an ETX-60 gathering dust. New project!

Thanks,
Steve

You would have to get a Autostar 497 controller because the original 494 controller can not do polar. I also noticed that I have to select a ETX70 in the setup, with a ETX60 it keep defaulting back to a Az/Alt mode but with the ETX70 selected it will boot in polar mode and you just have to push "mode" 4 times and its tracking.