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Yes imaging past the meridian is very handy. If the object is slightly north or south you can image for hours past the meridian. I did that the last few imaging sessions. It enabled 6 hours of data collection without any meridian flip with superb tracking. Very productive. PMX does that as well up to 2.5 hours past the meridian. The AP can go further than that. I believe it will do a full 360 if it doesn't hit anything.
Last night I had it leaning to the east quite a long ways, perhaps 2.5 hours before the meridian plus around another 3.5 to 4.5 hours on the other side so it may have even been 65 to 7 hours. That's about maximum you can image in a night on an object and really makes it easier to do long integration times. 2 nights like that is over 12-14 hours of data. That's really taking advantage of a clear night.
Peter, yes you do have to add the dovetail (about US$320 and a beautiful dovetail it is too, 3 knobs, a section of dovetail moves in as opposed to only a brass point which can crush your dovetail plate if over tightened in SB and weights costs are similar to SB). As far as seamless with software I find the AP1600 is very seamless with Sky X. I was able to upload the PEC curve more easily than for PMX and all the Sky X features like TPoint and Protrack work fine. I found it bypassed the SkyX bug on slew limits which seem very hard to set correctly and easy to get error message out of limit slew errors that are clearly not right, which leads to maybe 85% success rate on TPoint points as opposed to 100% with the AP. The main features SB mounts give are the Sky X Bisque TCS which really only is the software slew limits and the exercise the mount, plus the southern/northern hemisphere (also tends to be buggy and can flip to northern even though it states southern hemisphere). Tracking rates are also able to be changed easily on the AP. The AP does variable rates depending on position in the sky.
There is also an AP more advanced software control system which you buy. Although for me SkyX is sufficient. You can also tune the tracking rates with the AP software if you wanted to.
Greg.
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