The equipment in use at my home in Portugal

Telescopes

• 8" F/10 Meade LX200 SCT. This is the 'classical' (i.e. old) model. It has 'go-to' capability and remote focuser. I control it using the RS232 interface (made up from some telephone extension cable) and Cartes du Ciel software. Now I have a dual-core processor I can run scope control and camera control software on one machine - previously this did not work very well.
• 4" F/5 Helios Refractor on tripod with unregulated RA drive. Nice clear focussing and quick to set up, but not good for tracking.
• Ancient 8x30 binoculars.

Accessories

• Eyepieces: Meade Super Plossl 6.4mm, 15mm, 26mm. Helios Plossl 6.3mm, 10mm, 25mm.
• Celestron Ultima SV x2 Barlow. Helios x2 Barlow
• Meade F/6.3 Focal Reducer.
• Star diagonals (x2), flip mirror
• Motor focus for LX200
• Various filters, extension tubes etc

Cameras

• Starlight Express MX5-C 'one-shot-colour' camera. (Not currently in use due to its need for parallel port)
• Toucam-Pro  and SPC900NC webcams normally driven with K3CCD software.
• Canon PowerShot A530.
• Meade DSI with Autostar Envisage software.

Computers

• Tailor made Core 2 duo with 2gig memory. Good for all the heavy graphics and systemic calculations.
• Dell Latitude Laptop. Old Pentium II, 222Mhz model running Windows 2000. I can run the telescope control (RS232) from this if need be.
• Wireless network connects the machines and provides broadband access.

Software

Software used for astronomy-related activities:

• Starry Night Enthusiast - general purpose star  atlas.
• Cartes du Ciel - used to synch and control telescope movement & focus.
• MaxIm DL-CCD (very old version) used for camera control, image capture, calibration, colour conversion, colour pane alignment of MX5-C images and is often better than Registax for stacking still images.
• Paint Shop Pro (PSP7) used for final histogram, contrast, brightness, colour adjustment. Used for constructing mosaic images, sizing and labelling etc.
• K3CCD used for camera control and video image capture with webcams.
• RegiStax5 used for video frame selection, alignment, stacking and 'wavelet filter'. Also used sometimes to stack still images from the DSI or Canon.
• Neat Image (demo version) used quite often for noise reduction.
• iPrep used sometimes to apply dark frames and/or 'stretch' to all frames in a video file before submitting the video to RegiStax.
• Meade Autostar Envisage. Used to drive the DSI.
• This website has been produced with MS Front Page and uses Milonic menus.
• The Orbit Simulation and Cosmic Theory animations are written in Java and maintained using NetBeans.