alfingido

I bought the Pro too. Says offer ends 30th April but I bought it this afternoon, 1st May!

You can buy a 1.25" diagonal which will push straight in the back of the scope, but to be honest, you would be better buying a 2" diagonal, I can recommend one of these. https://www.telescopehouse.com/accessories/diagonals/diagonal-dielectric-99-quartz-lx.html it will screw straight onto the back of your scope and allow you to use 1.25" and 2" eyepieces. The other alternative is to buy the diagonal you mentioned earlier but you will need a 2" to SCT adapter. you also asked about eyepieces. Your 26mm eyepiece will allow you to see the bands on Jupiter, the rings of Saturn and many deep sky objects as well as crisp views of the moon and its craters. Of course, your seeing will be better if your sky is dark, wait till there is no moon to look at deep sky objects. i have an LX90, it's the second one I have had. After selling my first one, I have had a pretty comprehensive list of other scopes including a 12" dob, 9.25 Celestron and 10" Meade LX200, but I have returned to an LX90 ACF because I love the ease of use and views this scope gives me. i would also recommend a few more eyepieces, if you have dark skies, get a good 9mm, otherwise 12mm is about as small as you will need, then maybe 18mm, 32mm and a wide angle 40mm. The 40mm will give you lovely rich wide field views. There are lots of recommendations on makes and styles of eyepieces, I have a set of Meade HD60 eyepieces and a 2" fit super wide angle 40mm Aero eyepiece that gives superb views of big areas of the sky. i buy a lot of my stuff from FLO ( obviously) but I bought all my Meade kit from Telescopehouse. They are very knowledgeable about Meade and I had my scope fine tuned by Steve Collingwood of SC Telescopes. Both in Tonbridge in Kent and Steve is a Meade trained technician and well worth contacting if you need to get your LX90 up to scratch, or maybe just some more specialist advice. stick with your LX90, it's a superb telescope and good luck.

I know the feeling. I bought a new Audiostar handset with the latest firmware before I started messing around with updating the old one. Expensive way to do it, but I have been caught out before with a dead handset after upgrading! So, now I have a spare, should I ever need it and I can update one in the future and still be sure I have a working one. Allan

I have updated the firmware on my Audiostar controller and I haven't had the incorrect slewing after pressing Goto first. One thing that I noticed with the old firmware and new firmware is that the Tour freezes after it reaches the end. I have a spare Audiostar handset ( also with latest firmware) and the Tour freezes with this as well. To continue using the scope, I have to turn it off and realign, or come out of tour before I reach the end. The battery I use is a brand new very heavy duty 33ah Ring Booster battery that should be good for a few days use before charging. Allan

Hi, just installed the SkySync and got the mount tracking. In the day, with birdsong and someone with a mower about a mile away, I could hear a very faint ticking hum, certainly not very noticeable and i had to stand still and listen hard to hear it. At night, if I remember correctly now I've heard it again, it is barely audible when tracking. I also have a Meade LX90, it makes a little more noise tracking than the EVO, but again, it is barely perceptible in the day and I never remember hearing it at night except when using the scope, when again, it is a faint ticking hum. Both are pretty noisy when slewing, the Meade more so as it has a higher maximum slew speed. Hope this helps a bit Allan

I have the same mount, but haven't used it for a couple of weeks. I don't remember it being particularly loud when tracking. Just bought a SkySync for mine and am going to fit it this afternoon, I'll get the mount tracking and have a listen and report back shortly. Allan

That looks nice. I have the 6" version to go with my LX90 8". First impressions are that the Evo mount seems very well made, goto is very accurate and controlling it with an iPhone is so easy. Maximum slew rate is a little slow, but it gets there. I bought a Skysense camera to fit on mine. Alignment is so easy and again, Goto's are absolutely spot on. I think you will enjoy your Evo. Allan

I had an LX200 with LNT and had problems getting it line up like you. I used to set up the scope in the same place I set up earlier scopes then one night I moved it to get a better view to the west and it worked perfectly. I moved it back to the original site and had trouble again. I finally worked out that it was too close to a metal shed, which I assume was messing the alignment up. Check where your scope is set up in case you are near large metal objects. Reinforced concrete ( full of metal bars) could also affect the alignment. Allan

Id be very interested to see what the reply from Celestron and Astrozap is. I just bought a 6" Evo to travel around Europe with me, and the inbuilt battery was a big bonus. First night out with it was amazing. No wires anywhere, till the corrector Dewed up. I ran a hair drier off an extension lead to keep it clear. So, wires everywhere! Next night I fitted my dew controller off my LX90 and a spare heater band . Worked great, but again, wires everywhere, no point having a built in battery through the winter if you have to supplement it with power tanks or mains leads. I just bought a Tracer 10ah battery to power my LX90, if dew heaters can't be run off the EVO battery, then I will use this. But, in the ads for the EVO range, they do state that the onboard battery will run the scope and a corrector plate dew band. Or did I dream this? Suppose I ought to Google Celestron Dew bands...... I don't think it has dual encoder technology though. They have manual clutches, but once powered up, if you release the clutches, you lose alignment. That was the only thing that almost put me off buying the EVO. Allan

Brilliant thread and enough examples of what to see to keep going for a fair time. Now, let's see Telescope. Check Moon missing for a while. Check Nice and dark outside. Check 100% cloud cover. Check B****r Allan

Another clear night, thats 5 in a row............

That'll be one of the LifePo4 batteries, a bit too heavy for what i was wanting, but 1500 cycles is good.

The 300 cycle life was from Tracers own website, I notice that isn't stated anywhere else. I already have a large power tank battery, but I have a Celestron Evo 6 that has its own inbuilt battery and its nice to be able to carry it outside with zero extra cabling and set it up quickly. I also want to take this with us in the motorhome so having a spare small battery to power a dew controller on nights like last night would be ideal. It keeps the payload down on the van, it already weighs 4 tons, any weight I can save would be a bonus....... Allan

I have been looking around for a Lithium battery to power a dew heater for my scope. I have seen the Tracer batteries, but they seem expensive for a battery with just a 300 charge life cycle. Any recommendations for a make with a longer life? It just has to power a dew heater controller and maybe my LX90 for 2 or 3 hours at a time and be small enough to attach to the tripod Allan

So, my rs232 cable arrived yesterday and I managed to successfully update the Nexstar + handset, Skysense camera and handset. All ready to go and right on cue, the clouds cleared and stars filled the sky. Skysense was easy to set up and the resulting Goto's were absolutely spot on. I took my LX90 out to to compare them. Alignment of the Meade is so much quicker but both performed admirably giving me exactly the same views with each goto using similar sized ep's. There was definitely more contrast through the meade showing more detail in Orion and various starclusters, but the full moon was rising and washing out everything fainter. Then the clouds rolled in and I was having to use a hair drier on the Celestron ( I have dew heater bands on the Meade). I was very impressed again with the Celestron. It's light and easy to move around, goto is very good, it's not too noisy and the optics are excellent I think I am going to enjoy this setup, can't wait till the moon starts hiding, we get really dark skies here. I can thoughoughly recommend this little 6" Celestron, I can imagine the 8 and 9.25 are even better. Allan