Vixen Atlux - Nexatlux upgrade

[adamsp123]

Some of you may well know I have been digging around on this forum looking for advice on purchasing a new mount for astro imaging.

As I was considering the eye watering prices of some of the mounts that looked a good bet I came across "in the other place" an "upgrade" control board for Vixen mounts called NexSXD - NexAtlux.

These were available from Maite Ortiz in Spain for 170 odd Euros (170 billion new drachmas). Her control boards replace the Vixen one, you discard the starbook and use a Celestron HC or Nexremote, effectively converting the Vixen mount to a Celestron software controlled one.

Early posts I saw suggested this change worked very well improving particually tracking and autoguiding.

Now I like the Vixen starbook controller, a mini planetarium that IMO is a joy to use but there are inherent software issues with it especially DEC "bounces" that can wreck or at least cause horrible problems when astro imaging, I had tried all the tricks I found on the net but the problem would never completely go away, this NexAtlux looked to be a possible "low cost" answer.

I ordered a board from here - NexSXD

Maite was very helpful and I received the board promptly without any issues, the circuit board I expected to be a bit of a "cobbled together job" but I was pleasantly surprised to see it was a quality piece of kit very well made (I am a PCB designer by profession). I have suggested to her that the Atlux board is "conformally" coated at least on the non- component side as I have had a control board failure due to condensation dripping onto the board, a real problem with the way the board is sited in the mount.

Replacement instructions are excellent and after replacing the board and the mount back into the obsy I was ready to give it a go.

Firstly I had to sort out my new computer and get all the various bits of software/drivers working right and that evening the skies were clear.

I installed Nexremote which allows you to use a computer as the Celestron Hand Controller, after a couple of minor operator errors I had the mount slewing around nicely in goto mode and the accuracy was excellent. I then started PHD and tried to autoguide but PHD would not calibrate.??...bit of a panic, couldn't sort it so I gave up for the night.

Next evening I installed an earlier version of PHD and got the guiding working fine......

Last night I had a imaging run going, 8 min subs without any nasty DEC jumps, stars pretty good but I need to spend a bit of time tweaking the settings in PHD and do a drift align to improve the guiding a little more.

Happy - yes, so my secondhand Atlux mount has a new lease of life at a much lower cost than to replace it.

I do miss the ease of use of the Starbook but one bonus is that my control shed is a few steps up the garden from the mount and now I can centre my target using the Camera / Nexremote sitting in my shed instead of running up and down in the dark between the old starbook HC by the mount and my camera control at the computer.

So it is looking that I have made a good purchase and now have a hybrid mount that features the excellent Celestron Software combined with the excellently engineered Atlux mount.

Pete