The mount arrived Thursday. Why did I buy something made in the PRC? I needed a mount light enough for a grab-and-go telescope. What were my choices.
The Losmandy GM8 is made in California (sort of America). I have two of these already and they are excellent but not light enough to pick up or use for public astronomy.
The Vixen AP-SM is light enough with goto feature (you say where you want to point the telescope and after a few seconds of whirring motors, there you are! I was quite prepared to pay the premium price (about $1800 with the carbon fiber hybrid tripod). But Vixen lost its North American distributor. Vixen mounts are roughly twice the cost of PRC-made mounts that at first were clones of Vixen's mounts. I looked at buying from a Japanese retailer. With the current weak yen, the shipped price was $200 or so cheaper than the the last U.S. price. But there would be no warranty. I would not expect any real problems with a Vixen, but $1800 for a paperwork is not okay.
And those are your non-PRC choices other than incredibly expensive, long wsiting list, and truly top of the line Astro-Physics mount made in Illinois
The iEXOS 100 is light enough to pick up and carry without the telescope. The Televue-85 is a very expensive 10 pound telescope so I am not going to carry everything out in one operation. The telescope attaches to the mount using a Vixen-style dovetail, so attaching it quickly is easy.
Explore Scientific appears to have done most (all?) of the design work, not just imported an existing product
It is a very attractive piece of gear.
The white patches in various places are glow-in-the-dark to make sure no one stumbles into or over your mount in the dark.
It comes with two 1 kg counterweights:
Notice the beautiful finish unlike the crackle finish on the cheapest PRC-made mounts.
Two of these is not quite enough to counterbalance that scope so I have ordered several more from B&H Photo who had them in stock. There was a slight delay because I placed an order on the Jewish Shabbat but they are now en route.
The only design flaw that I can find is that thumbscrews that hold them in place are not centered on the weight so if you put them immediately adjacent of the shaft those knobs cannot be lined up.
This is purely an esthetic concern.
Even though the counterweights should do not balance the telescope, with the telescope on the mount, the goto motors have enough power to move it to alignment position. I used two star alignment where it picks a bright star and asks you to confirm it is centered. Once you confirm that it picks another star. Once those are picked, you can pick any object in its extensive database at which to point the telescope. The motors are surprisingly quiet. I am having trouble uploading video in the Blogger app so trust me.
It has a polar bore through which you look to get the polar axis aligned with North Celestial Pole, which is roughly Polaris for the next few thousand years.
The bore is so small that I cannot imagine a polar alignment scope that would go into it and provide useful light gathering (Polaris is not very bright)
The sky is now clearing so it is time to go outside.
No, it fooled me. We have had several clear nights. New mount summons cloud cover as sure as drawing pentagram summons Satan.
