[The_bluester (Paul)]

While I do not image (Trying very hard to stay off that greasy slope of money) I have had the same thoughts about set up and pack up times and trying to balance life at the eyepiece with the rest of my life.

I am aiming to put in a pier soon. With the CPC925 and visual observing I could pier mount it on the flat as alt az and just do the normal three star alignment to get it going, but I have come to a point where the slew time of the scope is starting to really irritate me and with that scope it is unavoidable.

My thoughts at the moment are to put in a pier, buy the Celestron wedge for it and mount that permanently on the pier with a bit of weather protection for when I am not using it. That way I can just set it up, polar align the wedge as well as I can and then simply cart the scope out and plonk it on the wedge when I want to use it.

Instead of doing a proper system alignment so that the goto works, I can "Align" it by telling it that is what I am doing and by just ignoring the step of actually lining up on the suggested star in a one star EQ South alignment, just hit the align button and the RA motor starts running. From then if I want to change targets I can simply unlock the clutches and point as it is really amounts to a polar mount with a clock drive. If I really want goto I can power cycle it and align the electronics properly.


With a little cart to get my gear out to the pier and back I reckon in that setup I could be observing in 5 minutes and not much longer to pack up again.

My only other option I can see to stop the mount bugging me would be to defork it and put it on an AZEQ6 or similar, but it seems a bit savage to disassemble something faily expensive that works perfectly as it was designed to to do that.