Notes from the field. My rants raves and frothing at the mouth about this maddening and frustrating buy lovely hobby

As a total fluke I found today that the LX80 plug is the same as the Celestron. I have a Starizona LiOn power pack and I had a adapter that Starizona sold to me so I could use it on my Meade products. I ended up accidentally breaking the adapter and hadn't gotten a replacement for it. As I was packing for the star party tonight I decided to just see what happened when I plugged it directly into the LX80. Lo and behold it powered on just fine!

On the subject of the Starizona power pack I cannot recommend this highly enough. While it is about the same price as the Celestron Powertank and way over the cost of the WalMart special it is 1/4 the size of the Power tank, does the same 7 Amp Hours worth of charge, uses Lithium Ion batteries so you don't have to keep it plugged in all the time when not in use, it doesn't have all the extraneous crap on it like the car jumpers/light/air compressor/etc, and it is much lighter. It does one thing which is to power your mount. Nothing more nothing less.