This will be the first of a series of posts on activities since the Summer! In June I mothballed my aging Meade 127ED and mount and procured a new Celestron 8 SCT with AVX mount.
Man do I love this mount. It's lighter, quieter when, more precise when tracking. The two star plus up to four calibration star polar alignment gives pointing accuracy that allows me to "go to" most targets without help from the finder. Yet, despite its lighter weight it is so much more stable than my 24 year old Meade LXD650.
Cooler is the "All-Star Polar Alignment" feature. With this feature after the initial two star alignment and optional four star calibration you can point the scope to a second star and follow a procedure where you center that star with altitude and azimuth adjustments to correctly point the polar axis to the true north pole. This makes for truly excellent pointing and tracking.
If I miss one feature from the Meade mount it is the ability to store locations as I use the scope in Harvard, MA, Myles Standish Forest in Carver MA, and Maryland. There is a optional GPS accessory that can feed the scope its lat / lon location on start-up but I'll live with index cards for now.
Then there is the new scope. SCT with their center convex mirrors lose a little in contrast and sharpness to refractors. However, the extra 3 inches in aperture of the SCT gives me almost 2.4 times more light over the 5" refractor.
Compared to the rack and pinion focuser on the 127ED, I never upgraded it, the SCT focuser is so, so smooth and precise. And, there is no mirror shift when focusing which greatly helps with CCD imaging. Then there is the tiny move per turn of the knob which allows you to get a really precisely focused stars.
