Mounts

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 ...

Tonight was first light with the LX80...

Impressions & thoughts starting with the bad...

It's a overly complicated $800 Alt/Az mount.

Overly complicated because in Alt/Az mode balancing the bloody thing is actually more difficult than on the CGEM. In Alt/Az the rail saddle is facing sideways which means for any OTA you are going to be supporting it all by yourself with no help from gravity. It uses a narrow and short Vixen saddle which again means ...

Tags: c11, lx80, meade

Categories

Meade LX80 , Celestron NexStar C11 OTA , Mounts , Telescopes