The sell off continues! Scope and camera gone, now for the mount
. The mount has served me well but I am cutting back my astro gear as I don't have much time to enjoy this hobby anymore. I plan to get back into it once I finish my study and the kids grow up.
I've used this mount with an 8" Newt, Tal200k and RC8.
I purchased this mount second hand from Matthew Lovell here in Adelaide back in 2006 (price was $1,900). The Astromeccanica system was manufactured by Astromeccanica (run by two brothers, Paolo and Franco Lazzarotti) in Italy. The company closed a few years ago but they now are involved with another electronics company
http://www.ltec.it/ There are a number of people who are upgrading to belt drive systems. More info about the Astromeccanica system can be found
here,
here and
here. A big positive is that the belt system eliminates high frequency periodic error caused by spur gears.
A few issues:
I spent a long time sorting out how to guide with this setup. There are no suitable ASCOM drivers. Well, there are ASCOM drivers, but they are outdated and not suitable anymore. I have successfully guided using ST4 protocol in combination with PhD (but other programs using ST4 can be used). EQAlign supports the DA1 via USB-serial interface and I used this program to polar align the scope.
While GoTo is supposed to be achieved via PC software, I never was able to get this to work using such software as EQAlign. I simply used setting circles for visible objects and setting circles plus AstroTortilla to find faint objects.
I've had constant battles guiding in DEC when using PhD. I would get the odd jump in the order of 1-2 pixels (guidescope 70mm f/11 refractor with Toucam). Not sure whether this is a mount or balance issue or something else! I stripped the DEC axis and re-greased and it did appear to help but not resolve the problem. I eventually gave up guiding in DEC and would just get accurate polar alignment to a point where there was little drift in DEC over the course of 5-10mins. If there was any drift during imaging, I would manually adjust using the hand controller. While most manual commands produced little over corrections in DEC, I would still get the odd 1-2 pixel jump but this generally resulted in an OK final image with round stars, including those when using my RC8 at native focal length (1624mm). I frequently got satisfactory guiding to 5-10mins. Check my posting history to see what pictures I have produced with this mount.
This EQ6 also comes with a height extension tube. If required, I'll throw in the Shoestring box needed to guide via PC.
Price $650. Local pickup only
