Celestron GCEM and CG-5ASGT

I was out last night after taking the C11 back to Celestron (I live close to their HQ) the previous week because of problems with the optics. I found that after cooling it and dealing with some problems with my finderscope I just did not enjoy looking through it. The views were brighter, I could go deeper, and the things I was looking at were "bigger" (note the quotes) BUT... For the most part I wasn't viewing I was cursing. Cursing that it hadn't cooled, cursing the weight of the CGEM, ...

Had to miss the scheduled star party tonight due to family obligations but decided well after dark to go ahead and setup the ES 127 on the CG5.

Started out by aligning the finderscope to the scope via Capella which was interesting because the finder scope on the ES held pretty true to it's alignment even after removal and storage in the case.

Tried alignment and things were... well... off. So I did the old factory reset and reprogram on the CG5 and it was back to performing ...

The Pale Bright Mistress was in full form tonight with her whole face exposed and high in the sky. Add to that a bunch of water vapor and my usual light pollution and I end up with an absolute crap night for being under the stars. But...

Why not? It was clear skies without clouds water vapor aside I had the new CG5 to play with with the Orion pier on it and that lovely lovely 127mm Explore Scientific Apo so there must be some stuff out there that I could see...
...

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 ...

Went to a star party tonight and had a really good time. It was also first light for the new C11.

The big problem I has was there were too many stars so alignment was harder! I found, per advice here, that if I looked for the brightest one then I should have been pretty good. The CGEM performed to spec and had the alignment stars in the RACI for the most part.

What was a big surprise was the view with the C11! I was absolutely blown away by the difference in ...

Tags: battery power, c11, cgem, pro tip, star party

Categories

Mounts , Telescopes , Celestron GCEM and CG-5ASGT , Celestron NexStar C11 OTA , Visual Observing , Lessons learned, technical and pro tips