This is the first time since May last year when I had an accident that I was able to make an image all on my own again. I drove my car to the site and did all the setup on my own. What a relief!

It was also a first light for my new Celestron CGX mount. My old CGEM was getting a little worn out and it always was a bit too light to carry my largest scope and so I decided to upgrade and went for this mount.

I am not very impressed. Celestron claims that this mount is for mobile use as well, but lifting that 20 kg mount head quickly becomes an sporting exercise for the elderly astrophotographer. The mount has to be set up by using a tool and I was in constant fear of dropping a washer or a bold and will spent a lot of time searching it. Well, I have know this in advance so it is all to blame on me.

The next thing was an attempt to balance the mount. This is impossible, both RA and DEC axis are so stiff that it made no difference when moving my scope back and forth for some 10 centimeters. The mount was and stayed "balanced". At this time I started to miss my old CGEM. Next thing was to polar align the mount. It comes without polar scope but there is a build in function called ASPA (all star polar alignment). The good news: This worked. At the second attempt. The manual says to "roughly polar align" the scope which I did. After a 2 star alignment (mandatory before you can start a polar alignment) I got stuck, because the angle I could move that mount with the azimuth adjustment knobs is ridiculousy small, less than half the angle I could move the CGEM. I simply was not able to get that star in the middle of my FOV and had to move the tripod with all the gear, so that my scope pointed fairly close to polaris. This is definitely a design flaw. I missed my CGEM even more. All I had to do was a polar alignment using the polar scope because when using a plate solving software there was no need for further alignment. This took a minute or so. Now, with my new mount I think with some pratice I should be able to do the same in about 10 minutes. Celestron sales a way overpriced polar scope for this mount, but it has to be detached from the mount for tracking and transport and I doubt that it will keep axis alignment very well.

Well, this is not the end of the story: guiding this mount turned out to be a nightmare. The ekos build-in guider was not able to handle this mount, PHD2 had never RMS below 1.0 averaging at 1.30. This is the worst RMS I have ever experienced. There seems to be a way to get better values when adjusting the spring loaded worm gears, but to do this I have to open the motor housings and voiding guarantee. I did not want to do this at this point and resorted to the MGEN Guider. No automatic dithering, no automatic meridian flip, because there is no INDI driver for this guider. After hours of fiddling with settings I got at least someting, that I can live with for the moment, but the guiding as it is now is far from good, it is hardly accceptable. I had to drop a lot of frames this time.

In the morning, after returning back home I fell down on my knees hugging my good old CGEM and promised to never, never, never sell it.