Equatorial mount
The belt-driven GoTo mount the imaging rig is built on. It tracks the sky's rotation accurately enough to hold a target still through long exposures, and carries a substantial optical tube without complaint. The Wi-Fi version is driven from a phone or laptop instead of the handset.
Tracking upgrade
Motorises both axes of an EQ5 mount so it can follow a target smoothly rather than being nudged by hand. The enhanced handset adds an ST4 autoguider port and selectable solar, lunar and sidereal rates.
Alignment
A small reticled telescope that sights through the mount's polar axis. Getting this right is what separates a night of round stars from a night of trailed ones, so it is the first thing done after the tripod is levelled.
Imaging camera
The main imaging camera: a cooled monochrome CMOS built around a Sony IMX585 sensor, with a filter wheel integrated into the body. Cooling suppresses the thermal noise that would otherwise swamp faint nebulosity. Supplied as a combo set with an off-axis guider.
Guide camera
A small monochrome camera that watches a single star and reports any drift back to the mount, which corrects itself many times a minute. Guiding is what makes exposures of several minutes possible at all.
Guide scope
The 50 mm ED doublet the guide camera looks through. Short, light and sharp enough to double as a wide-field astrograph in its own right when a small target does not need the main optics.
Coma corrector
Fast Newtonian mirrors flare stars into small comet shapes towards the edge of the frame. This four-element corrector flattens that away across a full-frame sensor without changing the focal length.
Automatic focuser
A motor on the focuser, so focus can be set from the software instead of by hand at the tube. Its temperature sensor matters more than it sounds: optics shift focus measurably as the night cools.
Session controller
The hub the rest of the rig plugs into. It carries the cameras, focuser and mount on powered USB, distributes 12 V, and puts the whole session on Wi-Fi, which keeps one cable run to the telescope instead of six.
Eyepiece
A long-focal-length two-inch eyepiece giving a wide, low-power view. This is the one most often at the telescope during public nights: generous eye relief and a big exit pupil make it forgiving for someone looking through an eyepiece for the first time.
Maintenance
Newtonian and Dobsonian mirrors drift out of alignment with handling and transport, and a misaligned mirror cannot produce a sharp star however good the sky is. Collimation is the routine that starts a field session.
