Driveway's End Observatory (DEO)

This is my portable computer controlled observing platform (the DEO). Since I live in a red zone on the light pollution map my gear needs to be portable and is frequently set up in my urban driveway, at our cottage or at the Saint Croix Observatory of the Halifax Centre of the RASC. My system now consists of a Zwo ASI2600 MC Pro coupled to a SkyWatcher Esprit 120 apochromatic refractor riding on a Celestron CGX-L mount. Focus control is provided by a Focus Cube from Pegasus Astro. Guiding is courtesy of an Orion SSAG and an 80 mm Orion scope with system control provided by a Samsung Windows tablet PC. The system as shown on the right is set up in the driveway of our cottage on the Mira River in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The system uses Sequence Generator Pro for camera and focuser control and Celestron's CPWI for scope control and ASCOM drivers, MosaicEngine for integrated image based telescope control and PHD for guiding. Most of my images are processed using Images Plus.

Same optics with my Canon 60Da set up on a ScopeBuggy in my urban driveway. It is surprising that you can acquire reasonable data from my urban driveway, the sky is a high bortle 6 at best and a mid bortle 7 most times with the worst nights pushing into the bortle 8 range on the light pollution scale. The Milky Way is no longer visible at the best of times, even overhead. The bright sky prompted me to buy an Optolong L-eNhance filter and the situation changed dramatically. It became possible to get great images of emission nebulae even under my light polluted skies. Galaxies, although not as good as images from a dark sky site, never seemed to be a problem from my site, the combination of their small size, tack sharp optics and a high dynamic range camera has allowed capturing galactic show pieces even under urban skies.