I have now had 3 decent nights playing around with my Paramount MX so thought I would post my impressions.
To set the scene I have owned numerous mounts over the years, LX90, Vixen GPDX, Losmandy G-11, Mountain Instruments MI-250.
The MX is by far the easiest and most pleasurable experience I have had to date with any mount. You set it up and it just plain works. No tweaking, tuning, fiddling that have come with nearly every mount I have owned.
The build quality is outstanding. Fully loaded the ALT/AZ adjustment for polar alignment is smooth and repeatable. The clutch system on the RA and DEC axis is brilliant. The ability to move from free rotation for balance, to locked to engaged with the twist of a knob makes balancing your equipment, and loading new equipment a pleasure.
The through the mount cabling, built in USB hub and power on the versa plate makes keeping everything neat and makes worrying about cable snagging a thing of the past.
The motors are smooth and very quiet and have virtually no detectable backlash. The joystick/hand control that comes with it is a work of art. Made from one machined hunk of metal it feels solid in your hand and makes manual pointing and visual observing with the scope a dream. The ability to change slew rates that are user definable allows you to set rates you are comfortable with. For observing the moon and surfing the limbs with the joystick that fits into your thumb is a treat and feels very natural.
The mount has lots of what I call idiot proof features that won’t allow it to harm itself. Motors and gear boxes are solidly shielded and mean you won’t damage them accidentally in transport or by doing something silly like taking your scope or counterweights off. Even if you do this and the gears are engaged they have a ratchet slipping mechanism that means they wont destroy your bearings or alignment of works to wheels.
Software integration is 2nd to none. The Sky X makes controlling this a breeze. The camera add on and T-Point add on that comes with the mount make automatic plate solving for synchronisation and pointing runs a very trivial matter.
The mount has several features to enable easy polar alignment. Because the mount is self homing you can get within 5 minutes polar alignment very quickly by homing mount then slewing to a bright star. You just then manually adjust azimuth and alt of the mount till star is centred and that puts you close. An awesome feature for portable setups. After this initial alignment you can then quickly create a 20 – 25 pointing run in the T-Point add on This takes around 5 – 6 minutes from begging to end for a 25 point run. After this you ask T-Point to generate a super model and then the software gives you a polar alignment report.
This report tells you exactly how many turns of the azimuth and Altitude adjustment knobs are needed to point to the refracted pole. I LOVE this feature. The alt and az knobs have graduated etched tics. Each one is 1 arc minute. The report says thinks like Loosen West and Tighten East Azimuth knob 2.5 arc min. This means turn it 2.5 tics.
2 – 3 iterations of this. I.e. do a 5 min pointing run 2 – 3 times and the report will tell you don’t adjust anything pointing is good enough.
Once Polar alignment was done the next task was to build a full pointing model. After just 50 points I had pointing being reported as accurate to 11.1 Arc Secs. This was good enough for my needs at this time. Although since I added another 150 points to this model.
Next up was tracking test. Without PE I took a series of 30 sec and 1 min shots of 47 TUC unguided at 1470mm focal length. Perfectly round stars on both 30 and 1 min shots without Pro Track feature turned on. I was very happy with this.
Next up was a real imaging run with guiding. Using PHD an Orion Starshoot guider and a 50mm finder scope I got the mount calibrated. Needed to use 2400ms pulses to get it to move the 25 pixels in each direction.
Once calibration was done guiding locked on and was very smooth. My RMS in PHD hovered at around .22 with a nice smooth guiding graph and no spikes. 10 min Subs all showed lovely round stars even with a decent wind blowing.
In short I cannot ask for anything more than what this mount is delivering so far. Easy to setup, great software, easy to use and great performance right out the box.
My next job to to program PE and do a big enough pointing model to test out the Pro Track feature. Will report back when this is done....
Cheers
Chris
Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with Software Bisque. Even though this reads like and advertisement, I am just a happy customer.
