cotak

I also know someone who purchased the cem60ec directly from iOptron, and was having issues with guiding. They waived his return date so he can have enough time to determine what's what before he decides big he'd just get another cem60 instead. While their customers service is not perfect it is quite good for a mass market company. Yes it's not a luxury experience but at least they are responsive. All those scare stories are overblown in their magnitude. It's not like AP and Bisque doesn't have users who receive bad copies. There even a YouTube video of someone who got a new ap1100 with a floppy DEC. In the end it was fixed but if you think the expensive brands are perfect you could find the truth to be very different. Too often the story line with expensive mount is that the QA is better, but other then finding a very frank large volume reseller who is willing to talk, we'll never know if that's true. Often to me it appears the way they gain their reputation is to change double what other costs then replace broken stuff with no questions asked. Which makes people feel better but doesn't help tell anyone if the quality is actually better. This hobby sometimes feel like there's more hearsay than facts.

The forest is smoking. Lots of East coast US complaints it's not so bad here, which I get but still they seems miffed that I am complaining at all. It was interesting for me cause I was looking at the sat feed and wondering what kind of cloud can't be seen in the IR data. Now I know. Should have known after all we use IR to look past stellar dust

Click to Find out.

The star is generally where Toronto is. Does anyone want to guess what I am complaining about? (Hint: take a close look at the color of the stuff in the skies, and the IR shortwave image).

That's Orion's website. They are a reputable shop. They are more or less a rebranding company that takes commonly available mass produced kit and resell it under their own brand. Not sure where you want it shipped but from USA (where they are) to Canada they covered all the fees etc so what I paid online was the amount the entire exercise cost.

Oh sorry the gear is already listed in the astrobin. Thoughts? Was pretty tired that night as I had a usb issues just after the sequence started, and had to go and debug the issue. That and I had been working late for the week. But it turned out ok so I am happy about it.

http://www.astrobin.com/413502/

How likely are you to travel with the kit? I believe the cem25 is a lot lighter. Both are good you can flip a coin and not be disappointed.

Well that's a sliver lining. The CEMs are really tight inside and not really designed to be serviced. I rather like the ieq45, much easier to work with.

Some US retailers and one Canadian one seems to suggest they do. Although in the Canadian case I can report that if you ask the answer is very unclear, and I have heard reports they ask to be paid to do so. As you'd expect I no longer do business with that retailer for that and other reasons. I'd be interested, but I suspect FLO would be shy about discussing it, how many units have gone out without returns. This is in relation to the constant disparaging of mass produced mounts as problem prone in other forums.

Yes the CEM60 appears to be in short supply. FLO reports it is due to some component shortage but no one knows anymore about it. I think is is likely a combination of the launch of CEM120 + CEM40, and the popularity of the CEM60 itself. I wouldn't worry too much about ultimate payload for now. There are example of CEM60 carrying 50lb of kit without too much trouble, and for a lot of people lifting 50lb regularly and in the dark is not consider a favorite activity. For a lot of people 8" of aperture is all they'll ever need so you need to ask yourself how likely you'll go above 8 from a weight and cost view. Since you are just starting you might end up deciding that for you APO refactors are the way to go, and in that case you might be hard pressed in the wallet sector to reach the theoretical payload limits. Backlash in general is in relation to declination only. It's is caused by gaps between metal gears. In older designs the reduction drive from motor to worm often use spur gears which cannot be 100% tight, so those tends to have more backlash where the space needs to be taken up before the worm turns. In the worm/wheel interface you could also have gaps which causes similar issues. In spring loaded worm system the gap is very small, just the space for the oil film from the grease. On fixed worm system the gap can only be set once and needs to allow for some variation due to temperature changes so tends to be larger than spring loaded systems. The end result of all this is that with a mount that has backlash your DEC guiding would show traces where a lot of guide inputs need to be given before there's a response, which can result in poorer guiding. In RA the worm and wheel gap means something else where the scope can end up bouncing between the two faces of the worm gear. To combat this people create a weight bias to force the scope into "east heavy" configuration. You need to be east heavy as that makes the worm/wheel loaded where the motor is driving against the bias. If the bias goes with the motor there are usually catch-slip events where the scope doesn't move for a bit until enough force causes the gearing to slip. As a result you need to either change the position of the counter weight after meridian flip or use some other method to always induce east heavy configuration (some hang a weight on the RA that gets wound up). I think what you mean about pressing button is that your target drifts with your current unguided setup? That requires guiding. To really do imaging you need to bite the bullet and just get on the guiding train, or really spend money to buy a system that can go unguided, but the latter often can be a bit of a pain as you also need to work to eliminate all sources of shift in the optical train as well which can be a nightmare for some.

Avoid the AVX. It's workable but I am firmly in the believe that it is the cause of many a post traumatic mount disorder. PTMD is when someone get their first eq mount, crashes with it and go off the deep end spending a fortune on a "premium" (don't you just love that love fest of a discussion over on CN?) mount and get the same performance others do on a skywatcher eq6. Typically that ends up with the user also telling everyone how the extra money paid resulted in round stars all the time (but dropping up to 50% of frames in private), and no stress or worries (tell that to people who sold their premium on cause they couldn't get it to work well enough either, these folks do exists). So lets go over your other options. I use a CEM60EC and I like it a lot. It took a bit of tuning to work out what guide settings works with it but overall satisfied customer here. The common warning you hear is about the worm, and it is scary at first but don't worry too much as long as you are taking your time during the engagement disengagement part you shouldn't have an accident. The worm mechanism does allow you to perfectly balance you kit if you spend the time at it which pays off I think in better results. Also, you get essentially zero backlash once balanced and worm is floating on the magnets. Otherwise be aware that while iOptron does stand by their products, quality control is not perfect so there is a small risk of a lemon. If you do get a lemon I think you'll find they will work with you to fix up to your satisfaction. The CEM60 is similar from my perspective for why you should or shouldn't buy one. HDX110 would be a good mount for the price. It'll be unlikely you'll out grow it. It is older styled and if backlash bugs you it might not be the best choice. I don't know too much about it but you don't see a lot of complaints. Mach1, ahh the premium of the lot. It's discontinued due to the up coming mach2. You do realize the base price does not include dovetail plate, counter weights, and hand controller (optional for AP)? While it is supposed to be a great mount and folks worship it, it isn't perfect. For the cost you don't actually end up with more performance for lower payloads, and for SCT it's limits as AP have said before is 11". Since 11" is also roughly what the CEM60 can do why would you pay more? Or why not throw the cem120 into the mix if you are willing to pay mach1 prices? What's more if backlash bugs you it's been stated by AP that the mach1 and everything else not mach2 (which has belts) can have 0.5 to 1 second of backlash due to the spur gears in the reduction drive. Personally, I find there aren't many reasons to buy AP. Now, if you are keen on talking to someone on the phone for support and wanting the "long term" support maybe this is for you. However, long term doesn't mean forever as older mounts like the 400 appears to be having difficult to find parts for (circa 2000 last copies I think). In the end I'd suggest the CEM60 as that's what I know the best. It does pretty much what most people want of it. It can recover from power lost on it's own. And generally works out of the box without any work by the end user (some of us are picky and would end up adjusting something anyhow). The downside is a small risk of a lemon and living with some idiosyncratic software design choices made in Nanjing (btw their local staff is great, but getting response from Nanjing can be challenging if you want to ask a serious question). If you are OK to pay more consider the CEM120, it's got better worm switches and better cable management.

The EQ6 is really a good choice. I am sure you'll enjoy using it. Weight isn't a big deal for me but even with the CEM60 I wouldn't call it something you don't notice when you have it in your hand, quite the opposite. Actually as weight is one of it's selling point I was quite surprised at how heavy the hard case is with the mount inside.

This is a game for people who likes rabbit holes. What is your current mount? Do you really need to change your mount for a c8? The c8 isn't that heavy in the grand scheme of things and it's very compact so unlikely to really exceed the limits of all but the lightest class of mounts. Even try cem25 has been known to swing a c8 now and again. Chasing star FHWM it might be worth your while to get an AO unit instead. It would make it much more likely to get godly guiding. As to the 1/2 and 2/3 rules. Those are really poor way to describe a problem with many facets. I have seen someone throw a 12" Meade on a cem60 and have reasonable results on his first try at imaging. I have also seen someone overload a heq5 with great success. What is likely true is that the eq6 type mounts with fixed worms are stiffer in relation to external disturbance. While the spring loaded ones likely is best used when calm or inside wind protected observatories. Even the way you balance them are different. The fixed worm types often requires biased balancing, while I have found my iOptron mounts has subtile but significant performance improvements when 3D balancing is achieved. I say subtile because unless you are using an EC version you might not even realize there is soemthing there due to the noise of regular guiding. I didn't even realize that I had terrible guide frame download lag and variances until I tried to better understand why short and long guide exposures resulted in such different behaviours. As it turns out the lag contributed to inducing oscillations in I believe both the EC and the ieq45 pro, but just that with the ieq45 there was a lower expectation on my part to what it should look like so I never noticed a problem. So from the above my conclusion is that there could be a lot of people who tried ioptron only to discount them due to those final few factors which might seem small but could have a big impact. As to your choice specifically, both mounts will work well with a c8. Your real question should be if the other factors like future OTA upgrade or features like the cable management setup on the cem60 matters.

http://www.astrobin.com/412681/?nc=user When I first saw images of this object I was pretty interested in imaging it. This is actually my 2nd attempt and while it's nice to have something blue instead of red, it doesn't looks as mesmerizing as I had hoped. Also that optics issue that's making cat eye stars needs to be looked into. Whoops I appear to have created this in the wrong part of the forum...

In some places like Toronto the temps are 30-40 in the summer, and -25 in the winter. Self adjusting worm like what iOptron has make sense in my use case. And once I got my balancing right and the guiding smoothed out we do see this on my EC.

Well the general difference for me is just noise. Which i noticed some people here are very keen to squish. However, for me I prefer to keep a bit in because otherwise it ends up seeming artificial and overly mushy. And when I print even at large sizes the noise disappears. Another thing is the color of stars. I don't find it to be as natural looking as when I do color calibration in APP. So for me the amount of time spent in ST to get to that point as it does take a while to process, is not justified. And that's just a personal choice as similar results can be had in photoshop and I actually find it's quicker that way for me in absolute processing time. And we are not talking a dog slow old computer, I am doing all this on a i7-4790 with SSD and 32 gigs of ram.

Knock youselfs out https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkohAodcrTbmnyscZdCoexnO95l0

Just a matter of time vs results. I find the results from ST to be more pastel colored than with just APP + PS. Since I will do final touch up in PS, and APP has more control over its faster gradient removal tool. There is very little reason to go into ST at all.

The min temps are based on the commerical electronic components ratings, but those are nothing more than suggestions in reality when you talk lower end of temperature. I have used the ieq45 pro and cem25 at -25C many times without issues. Even when the ieq45 been cold soaked for a few days outside in the observatory. So don't worry too much about that. Since we have such wide temperature ranges here in Canada, the eq6 would likely require different worm mesh adjustments to achieve best possible performance based on temperature. And if you are hauling it in and out that might be an issue if you want to do the adjustments in doors. My ioptron mounts work the same without adjustments whether it was approaching 40C out or -25. As for forever. Never say never. Although for most people who aren't very wealthy or just spending all their money on this hobby, going to a point of exceeding the payload limits of the cem60 would be prohibitive in cost.

Sure. It's also why i put the astrobin link cause all the kit and exposure is detailed in the technical card. This was 39 frames of 300s on a edgehd 8. I was using a Qhy163C at -10C, and the default DSO gain and offsets setting. Was those the details you wanted?

http://www.astrobin.com/411502/ Love emission nebs, doesn't take ages to get usable data.

In this case it is the difference between APP and DSS+startools. Which is why I wouldn't recommend anyone use ST today. Otherwise it's the same camera and LP filter.

http://www.astrobin.com/411386/?nc=user New one above. Old one below with supernova 2017eaw. http://www.astrobin.com/360954/?nc=user

Update. Was chasing ghosts a bit. And I think it did harm as stars were slightly every so elongated. It seems there's something weird about how PHD handles frames downloaded at a slower cadence than your guide exposure settings (say due to a USB2 guide cam). Let me demonstrate with some PHD2 results... Oh no! SAW TOOTH (bad subframe setting resulting in almost 6 second cadence vs 500ms exposures due to every other frame being corrupted + some extra delays): But wait... using correct subframe size not to cause weird frames to be dropped every other frame (700ms cadence on 500ms exposure): Back on CN there was a gent who struggled with his CEM60EC seeing saw tooth patterns unless he used very specific exposures and settings. I wonder if his issue was similar to mine. Now with correct subframe I can get 2 second guide exposures with 75 aggression and 0.6 min-mo (works out to about 0.5" minmo). However, 4 second 75 agg and 0.6 min-mo still seems to get better guide results. One important thing is that cadence thing resulted in higher measurement of the so called SDE, but once the cadence was faster that measurement dropped it actually disappeared completely in PHDlog viewer. So that's interesting. I wonder if the old SDE complaints were in some parts due to bad PHD2 vs cadence behavior?