The case for keeping things simple. I happened to have shot these images 3 years apart, but from the same location. The one on the left was the outcome of a lot of effort put into getting autoguiding to work reliably out in the boonies, away from mains power. The secret was to have an ample supply of batteries. I had to bring 2 truck batteries plus a car battery. On previous occasions I had failed because I brought along either only one or two batteries and something always failed, the autoguider went astray or the laptop crashed, etc. So I need something like 40+kg in batteries alone to keep things ticking nicely, autoguiding all night long. Add to that a hefty mount like the CGE. In the intervening years I tried to simplify the luggage requirements, a lot! I can now get similar results, on the right, with less than 15kg of luggage in total, inclusive of mount, tripod, camera, OTA, batteries and no laptop, no guider. The mount runs on 4 C-cells and the camera on its own internal batteries.

The above also demonstrates why it is so very difficult to compare astro equipment. The lens on the left costs $7500, on the right $1100. The mount on the left costs $2500 (+$1300 for the autoguider!), the one on the right $1100. The 1Ds (11 megapixels) cost me $8000, the modded 40D (10 megapixels) $1800. Yet, because of clouds moving around, and a crescent Moon spoiling the dark sky, the better image seems to have come from the far less expensive, much, much more portable equipment. $20,000 worth of equipment (approaching 100kg) is being out-imaged by $4500 (15kg). Keep things simple ;-)

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