Explore Scientific exos2 pmc8 mount

[Spider-Man]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to get a reasonably portable goto mount for a William Optics Z103 refractor, I'm just starting out but, my main interest is astrophotography.  My budget is limited.

I spotted the Explore Scientifice exos2-gt with pmc-eight goto system, which looks like quite an elegant solution, as it does away with the need for handcontroller & separate computer, everything being controller by an app on a tablet, and wondered if anybody in the forum owns this mount system and what they think of it's performance & usability?

[PEMS]

No direct experience of that specific mount but for a wifi controlled mount you have 2 negatives:

The phone/tablet needs to have sufficent power for the whole session and for AP that may be a number of hours. Will the tablet run the app and the display and whatever else for say 4 hours? Mine would not I expect, especially if cold.

The second is if you take the tablet or phone out of range the connection is lost and you have to start at least the alignment and target acquisation all over again.

Neither prevent you using a tablet but on a mount wifi is not necessarily as good as it is around a house. And it is too easy to slip up.

Unsure what you mean by does away with the need for a separate computer. I doubt a normal tablet could collect and store the total mass of images from an imaging session. So for that I would expect you still need a computer.

Edited March 16, 2020 by PEMS