Our telescope and astro camera now sit atop a new harmonic mount, Sal-33 from MLAstro. All the way from Vietnam, it is a good looking piece of industrial equipment, shiny and sharp. It is well machined, it supports open source framework, and most importantly, it has a feature called zero-shift polar alignment. It makes the rest of our astrophotography gear look and behave like a cat, graceful in its movement. The mount polar aligns in a jiffy and as a result, we are a little more relaxed during our shoots (the two characters are borrowed from a well loved drawing that I had bought from a New Orleans street artist over a decade ago).
Our first mount was Sky-watcher Star Adventurer GTI, a classic worm and wheel gear mount. It looks like a puppy dog. With the counter-weight, it looks like a puppy dog with a rod shoved down its throat. When the rest of the gear was mounted on it, the arrangement looked like daddy-longlegs (link). The mount itself is fiddly, polar alignment takes upwards of 60 frustrating minutes. Thankfully, we were eager.
MLAstro allowed us to add a personalized laser engraving to the mount and chatGPT allowed me to create an engraving. Components are: a) a minimalist, thin-line crosshair centered on the image, b) a single, sharp four-pointed starburst (compass rose style) offset into the upper-right quadrant presenting the north pole (where we want to get to), c) RA axis and Dec axis, showing the pulses needed for guiding, one more aggressive than other, independent of each other.
Mounts are the foundation of all astrophotography. I appreciate this new hardware but I was grateful before. I am grateful for a sky full of stars. When we couldn’t track the stars, we had star trails (link). The star adventurer GTI with our DSLR allowed us to take photos of the Pleiades (link), the Orion nebula (link), the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way (link). The star adventurer GTI combined with our first dedicated telescope and astro camera allowed us to take photos of several nebulas, Flaming Star and Tadpole (link), the Rosette (link), the Heart (link), and the Horse and the Flame (link).
Locomotoring 
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