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Old 10-09-2010, 05:37 PM
noswonky (Peter)
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noswonky is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Blue Mountains, NSW
Posts: 146
Quote:
Originally Posted by CraigS View Post
Hmm .. Peter;

So now I'm wondering how much power one night's observing might take ? I'd love to get out of having to manage the charging & transportation of that battery pack. Do you reckon you could scale down the power supply if you stick to 'push to' for long distance slewing ?

Cheers
I've only had the auto-tracking scope about a month, so I'm not yet sure how much power it uses.

It came with a battery pack which takes 8 'D' size batteries (producing 12V) and I'm using heavy duty batteries.

I've probably run it on one set of batteries for at least 8 hours (possibly more) in total - tracking most of that time - and the batteries still seemed ok. However, I don't use the motors for slewing more than a few degrees.

I did change the batteries after that to avoid them going flat during a star party, so I'm not sure how much power they had left.

But my feeling is that it doesn't seem to use much power. I would expect the go-to version to use more power due to the more sophisticated hand controller and the greater use of motorised slewing.
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