Finally got my new AVX!!!
It's a long story, but I actually got a different AVX about a month ago that turned out to be defective—so I had to send it in to Celesteron to get a replacement. It had faulty RA and Declination motors which caused it to fail at basically everything including alignment and tracking—so it was essentially useless. However after about a month, I finally got the new one back, which was much less than I had expected.
Anyway, this image is just a simple test to see if the new one works... which it obviously does. I only did a basic 2 star align with 1 calibration star and a crude ASPA polar alignment. My main reason for this was to see how good of an exposure I could get if I didn't even bother to align it with absolute precision.... This may sound crazy but the reason I did that was so I had a benchmark of knowing if I had a good unit or not.
As a contrast, the defective unit, I would do 2 star alignments with 4+ calibrations stars and several iterations (sometimes more than ten) of polar alignment for hours and hours, and I wasn't ever able to produce more 3 second exposures without erratic motions and trailing... no joke.... but that's why it was defective.
Needles to say the new mount produced 50-80 second exposures without trailing... so I definitely now have a functioning mount
...and now that I know that I'm going to be spending a lot more time properly aligning it and hopefully getting much much longer exposures.
I'm just glad that Celestron was so easy to work with, and am glad that they were able to sort everything out for me.
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