Before June 2011, this is the set-up that I used for most of my astrophotography:

• 12-inch Meade f/10 LX200GPS telescope
• Canon 400D camera
• Orion 80-mm f/5 guidescope
• Orion StarShoot Autoguider
• Laptop computer with software to control the camera and the autoguider. 

In this picture, the camera is connected directly to the telescope so it is working at f/10, but in some cases I inserted a focal reducer to lower the f ratio.  The camera was controlled by a laptop computer using ImagesPlus software.

The only part of the set-up that always remained outside was the pier and the simple equatorial wedge that I built out of a few pieces of channel iron and had welded.  The wedge had adjustment bolts so that it could be accurately polar aligned.  I did this alignment using the star-drift method just once, and never had to adjust it again.