Sky quality is around Bortle 6, and living in a river valley means the seeing is often unstable because of thermals from the river. My imaging telescope is an Esprit 100, 100mm aperture at f=5.5 (550mm focal length), mounted on an Avalon Linear equatorial mount. I also have a Vixen VC200L and a Celestron 9.25, but I tend to use them for visual observations on an old and rather cranky Vixen GPDX Skysensor mount
I use a Rigel Quikfinder to do star alignment, but usually my pointing software (see below) gets my target onto the CCD camera chip first time.
I am a complete numpty when it come to computery stuff. The Lodestar refused to work on any of my XP machines (despite Terry Platt's - the brains behind Starlight Xpress - best efforts: fantastic support from SX, though, I have to say) and so I now run everything from a second hand Lenovo laptop running Windows Vista. Windows 10 is pretty much useless for astrophotography as that nice Mr.Gates keeps changing his virus-prone software whether his customers want changes or not, with said "updates" often as not rendering my AP software inoperative. He has fortunately lost interest in Vista (and now Windows 7 - hooray!) and my AP laptop never gets connected to the internet anyway, so touch wood...
A combination of EQASCOM (a brilliant bit of freeware) and Chris Marriott's excellent SkyMap Pro 10 handles the telescope go-to pointing with the NEQ6, and PHD v2.6.2 looks after the autoguiding. I have to say that in my hands to date, PHD really is PHD, so hats off to Craig Stark and his team for yet another bit of superb freeware!
I use Astroart 4 for image acquisition and pre-processing. Final image processing is done in PaintShopPro version 7. These are very old bits of software, but Adobe Photoshop have gone for a rip-off rent model and I am worried that Pixinsight will turn me into a smug, jargon-spewing bore (or at least, more of a one than I am now). I did have a look at the latest version of PSP but I did not understand a single keystroke of it! I dread the day I have to upgrade that...
So if you are looking for Hubble telescope quality images or NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day, you are in the wrong place.
The images presented here are simply meant to be (hopefully) pretty pictures of good enough quality for blog posting, and which are adequate to illustrate and exemplify what can be seen in the night sky. Sorry.
I hope that the results here show that interesting images can still be obtained with modest resources and effort.
And that you can still have fun doing it.
