Update…. My William Optics GT81 is not behaving well, so my notion of a travel scope just got a little bigger. Here is a Takahashi FSQ106 that seems quite at home on the new mount. I will have to iron out my issues with the GT81 on another day….
Since I now spend half of the Winter Season in Borrego Springs, it was the appropriate time to “invest” in a proper travel Astrophotography kit. The introduction of harmonic drive mounts made the choices more interesting. I looked very hard at the ZWO AM5 mount because the ZWO ASIAIR system works so well as a simple Astrophotography platform and I thought that getting a ZWO mount would integrate more harmoniously (pardon the pun). Ultimately, however, I chose the Ioptron hybrid equatorial mount (HEM27ec) with encoders, because I think it is a more technologically advanced mount that is built by a mount builder that has been around for awhile. Initially it took a little bit of work to configure the Ioptron mount software to work properly with the ZWO ASIAIR. Once I got the proper updated driver from ZWO technical support, the system worked flawlessly. I hope to have some images from the set up soon. The telescope is the William Optics GT81 connected to a ZWO ASI2600MM. I will be using a filter drawer and Chroma 2” narrowband filters. It is amazing that so much technology can be put into such a small Astrophotography package. The mount head weighs about 8 lbs. and no counterweight is required.
My online store location:
www.astrolavista.Etsy.com
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