I have an Olympus SP 510 UZ camera that will let me take exposures up to 8 minutes (bulb setting). I would love to get into astrophotography with just a digital camera and a motorized mount for tracking the stars, planets, etc.
Is there a "cheap" motorized mount you can buy (not build) that can be used just for the camera? Make a barndoor tracker and have fun!
Mine cost me about $5 in materials. I have to turn the handle every 15 seconds. Big deal... It depends on what you mean by "cheap". I bought a Celestron CG-5 mount and tripod for my 25-year old camera for about AU$250 ($US210). You may also be able to combine SOMETHING LIKE the following 2 items. Forget the scope, it's probably rubbish. But the tripod and mount may take the motor.
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/NEW-WHITE-70mm-RE...
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/TELESCOPE-MOUNT-M...
Taking good shots of the open sky is almost as much fun as looking through a scope! BTW, is that a 35mm or DSLR camera? Forget ebay and places like that, this includes supermarkets.
These mounts are very unstable and the drive gears very sloppy.
If you want to image with a camera lens of more than 50mm focal length, you need a stable mount that is fairly accurate.
Once you get over 200mm focal length, the mount's accuracy requirements go up rather steeply. In other words, the longer the focal length of your camera setup, the more accurate the mount has to be.!!!
But you can take simple star images of up to about 12 seconds exposure with just the camera on a Tripod with a 50mm lens.
Or you can expose for a longer time and get star trails.
For longer exposures you will need a decent mount. Take a look at the Orion Catalog at www.telescope.com I would suggest that the minmum sized mount for basic imaging is the "Astroview" mount. That would increase to the "Skyview Pro" mount for imaging with anything over 200mm focal length.
At longer focal lengths, the Mount is THE single most important part of your whole setup!!
The same thing applies to telescopes as well.
I can take good pictures with mediocre optics on a good mount, but the opposite is definitely not true. The mount has to track accurately enough to keep the image centered with the accuracy of the size of one Pixel of your imaging chip in the camera. That is an accuracy measured in Microns!! Otherwise fuzzy pictures will be the result.
The above are minimum requirements for any type of long exposure Astrophotography.
The moon and planets are bright enough to require only short exposures, for them a simple tripod is enough. But that is not true for deep space objects.
If your aim is to be able to take exposures measured in minutes, such as your camera is capable of, you will need some type of guiding setup to correct for inaccuracies within the mount as well.
My information is obviously based on very sketchy info and needs to be tailored to your exact requirements. I would like to suggest that you take a look at a site called "Astropix" by a fellow named Jerry Lodriguss. He has excellent articles there to take you through the whole astro-imaging process and lets you know exactly what is required for the different types of imaging.
Hope that helps.
Adolph | 