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DJN, I'm still learning compared to many more experienced folk here, but I asked your questions about 6 months ago, so what I found is
1) No differce accord to Lee Andrews - spray it white and charge more - no sense in that!
2) Almost no regrets within tthis mounts weight limits and price brand
- once I set up the mount as sited at Sydney - rather than its precise lattitude and longitude from google. With precise co-ordinates about one in three gotos would slew the wrong way and cause collisions between scope and mount - a real no no! Going back to default location fixed this perfectly!
Also I wish the mount took time from an internal clock or a PC connected to the hand controller, as I have mine in a fixed location so then a hibernate / wake-up would be all it needs to locate thing sprecisely each evening.
Too you need third party software for autofousing, guiding, goto control - all achievable at low cost but it would be nicer if Celestron bundled all this like Meade do, rather than you having to buy 3rd party add ons from scratch!
The manual lacks some detail. Two examples:
1) Once it has 3 or even 6 star alignment I presumer it would correct for cone (pointing error automatically) no only on GoTo's but on tracking! It doesn't!!!! On gotos it corrects very well, but then it just runs the RA motor at the rate of an hour hand, rather than running both motors and self correcting your alignment error from celestial south.
Another annoyance is that the mount then knows your alignment errors and allows you to correct it, BUT only when pointing at one of the dimmest objects in the sky that a new amateur might not pick correctly - Sigma Octans. I wish it could select a real bright, visible alignment star - e.g. Altair, Antares etc - slew to it pause for 5 seconds then slew off it with based on your alignment error from Celestial South and allow you to manually adjust the mount.
2) Entering date / time or other set-up paramters - you have to hit Undo to get into edit mode - not Enter as the manual says. Too the clock doesn't start (even though time is the second paramater entered) until all 6 or 7 parameters are supplied. So to be accurate add 60 seconds or so lead time and only press the final Enter button (for the current date) once your scope set-up is all complete.
So it has oddities and dumb limitations that you can mostly work around easily once you know they are there!
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