AbsolutelyN

That's the one I use, does the job perfectly well for my 250pds. It's not been in stock for a long time but they come up second hand every now and then. Edit - I've never experienced any reflection issues or indeed any other issues. Bought second had for £105 couple of moths ago.

The moon is a bit bright for galaxies at the moment so I pointed the scope at a HA target as far away from the moon as possible from my view point. Unfortunately the Elephant's Trunk Nebula is still low in the sky so noisier that I would have liked. 6.3 hours with 250PDS and ZWO1600MM https://www.astrobin.com/knu7vt/

Thanks Mark. I was interested to see far I could sharpen it without it looking overdone. Always hard to judge and generally look at it next day and you conclude it is over sharp after all ...

The moon is getting too bright for my (deepsky) liking but is always truly amazing when you take time to actually look at it. 250 frames with 250PDS and ZWO1600MM at about 7:30pm.

M106 and surrounding galaxies. I was particularly drawn to the varying scales of all the galaxies, from big to barely visible. 5.5 hours with 250PDS and 1600MM. Taken 15th April 2021

We had our willow tree pollarded in April so I grabbed this quick picture before it sprouts back to life. When stood in the dark you could feel its presence behind you. About 2hours of 30 second exposures stacked with Sony A7R3 and Sigma 14-24 2.8 lens. Taken 12th April 2021.

Thanks Neil. If buying new it will be with FLO as I know they will sort any issues. Good point on second hand.

Does anyone have any experience of iOptron support? For instance I needed to replace main board on my AZEQ6 a couple of years ago and it was very quick and easy to get a replacement from OVL. Never had any dealings with iOptron and can't say I'm impressed with their website.

It certainly does act as a sail but given calm conditions you can get very good results with it even with a light weight azeq6. Lots of great points here, it's now very clear CEM70 is not up to it and CEM120 is needed. I think I was a bit taken in with the 32kg and hope that there might be a cheaper option. Clearly not.

I dread to think when these things will be back in stock ... I guess it leaves lots of time to save up.

You're right, I guess I was hoping something more affordable existed 🙂

That's really interesting thanks. I was drawn to the EQ8 because I've used their support before which was ok but iOptron is totally new to me. Looks like it is the way to go for my budget.

Thanks that's interesting. Is it a daft question to ask if the Celestron CGX-L is in any way comparable to the other mounts in same price range?

Thanks, I infer from that the CM70 won't really cut it then. Better start saving.

Unfortunately way out of budget. I think they are in region of £6k and ideally I’m looking for half that.

My 250PSD is pushing my AZEQ6 mount to the limits and it often struggles to guide acceptably for even 2 mins so I'm looking at upgrading my mount. I'm trying to think long term as in I don't really want to have to buy another at a later date but I also don't want to spend a fortune on an overkill mount. It will be used with my 250mm Newtonian but in the future max weight scopes I can see it might need to handle could be a 300mm Newtonian or perhaps a RASA 11. The CEM70 seems to have a recommended weight for astrophotography of about 21kg (2/3rds of 31kg) which is fairly reasonable given with care you can push them a bit like I am currently doing. It won't be setup in an observatory but it will be semi-permanent so setup times for mount does not concern me as I only do it a couple of times a year. However my query is am I better simply saving and going for CEM120 or EQ8R? They are considerably more expensive so other than weight capability will they perform much better or is it diminishing returns? Any thoughts really appreciated.

M82 taken over the last two nights where I managed to get 9.6 hours altogether. Taken with the SkyWatcher 250PDS and ZWO1600MM. https://www.astrobin.com/yicme0/B/

That's amazing! Well done

Thanks. The 178 pairs very well with the 250pds but I've only used that on mars, might be tricky on deep sky.

60 seconds per filter - probably 50% luminance. I find you don't really need that much colour. Did fine with just 20 mins blue the other day

Tracking was at best 0.8, it really deserves a better mount. Quite amazing how sky quality makes a big difference too - images earlier in the week were so much easier to get the colour right, this one was awful to colour balance.

Thanks Craig. It's just 60 second exposures. The guiding just wasnt good enough to go any longer and out of two full nights about 50% of the frames had to be discarded due to either bad stars or haze.

Cracking image Lee!

The sky has not been quite as transparent the last two nights so this one took two nights due to bad guiding and the colour was much more difficult. I've gone for a 16-9 crop because I wanted to keep in the little galaxy on the right but not sure if it quite balances. Best viewed bigger as the crop makes the galaxy quite small. 6 hours with 250-PDS and 1600MM. Full res on astrobin - https://www.astrobin.com/h1lzm3/ The revision attached show my very first attempt at this galaxy - by chance just happens to be 6 years ago to the day. EOS-M with a Vixen 80SF