That iEXOS 100 Mount

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 besutiful 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 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.

My Lenovo WiFi Problem

I have had an intermittent problem with my Lenovo 11e failing to remain connected. After connecting, it would stay connected for about four minutes. Then it dropped the connection and forgot the password preventing auto reconnect. (And annoying me by requiring me to type the password again.)

Lenovo, to their credit, tried really hard to fix this, replacing the WiFi transceiver twice at my home and a few days at their North Carolina facility. After each repair, I would travel and it worked great.

Yesterday and today, I have been using this 11e to control the iEXOS 100 mount.  The mount has a server, so if you connect to it, you disconnect from the house WiFi. It seemed to work fine with the mount.

I asked SuperGrok to help me. It suggested that the problem was in my home's router. This would explain why the problem never appears when traveling. So I went to the Cadillac and connected to its router. No problem. 

SuperGrok suggested that a several year old WiFi transceiver might not handle the WPA2/WPA3 transition causing loss of connection and password. SuperGrok had me call Sparklight to change my settings. 

It was already set to WPA2 but the tech turned on something called Compatibility Mode. My 11e no longer drops connection.

Remember When Bigots Said Women Were Too Emotional to Vote?

 Click here too see an International Women's Day protest in New York City. The bigots were wrong but leftists screaming at the sky does nothing to refute it.

I Want to Believe There is a Lot Missing

3/5/26 People:

Man Fell in Love with Google Gemini and It Told Him to Stage a 'Mass Casualty Attack' Before He Took His Own Life: Lawsuit

It is very disturbing. Clearly, this guy was a few fries short of a Happy Meal or he would not have taken his cellphone this seriously. Nonetheless, Google needs to provide transcripts rhat demolish this claim or just shut Gemini down while they fix it. This assumes Gemini allows that. 

Handle for Televue-85

Once I stopped fighting the inability to mill a thin piece of aluminum, it was pretty easy. I cut a .5" slice of 4x2 rectangular aluminum tube, drilled two  201" through holes 1.250" center-to-center, went to Tacoma Screw for two stainless steel 10-32 x 3/8" socket head screws and just screwed it in place using an Allen wrench. 

It is easy to pick up and hold in position with one hand while using the other hand to tighten the bolts that hold it in the Vixen saddle.

I still have enough rectangular tube to make probably 30 of these. There is very little work involved.

1. Slice a .5" piece on the chop saw using a clamped stop to get consistent slices.

2. Put it in the mill. Run a program that uses a center drill to make the through holes. (On first article, I used a center drill to make a pilot hole, then a .2010 twist drill, but I can use a center drill to make hole in one operation.

3. Sand all external surfaces and cut edges.

4. Use file to break all corners to make sure it will not cut skin.

I could do these assembly line in about 3 minutes each. The rectangular aluminum tube is a sunk cost. The only marginal costs are the 10-32 screws and my labor. If I can find buyers on CloudyNights, I might do a production run.

I was using this evening. What a change from grasping it with one hand!

More About the Weak Response From the Islamic Nation of Britain

3/4/26 BBC. Let me also mention that the Conservative MP who savaged Starmer's failure was black.

Sir Keir said: "We're taking action to reduce the threat with planes in the sky in the region intercepting incoming strikes, deploying more capability to Cyprus, and allowing US planes to use UK bases to take out Iran's capability to strike.

"What I was not prepared to do on Saturday was for the UK to join a war unless I was satisfied there was a lawful basis and a viable, thought-through plan. That remains my position."

The PM said the government had also been pre-deploying capabilities in the region for a number of weeks, including radar systems, ground-based air defence, counter-drone systems and F35 jets.

He added that wildcat helicopters with anti-drone capabilities would be in Cyprus this week, with a Royal Navy warship, HMS Dragon, also deployed to the region.

However, Badenoch accused the PM of "catching arrows rather than stopping the archer" in his approach.

"I would say to Labour MPs, we are in this war whether they like it or not. What is the prime minister waiting for?" she added.

She pointed out HMS Dragon was still in Portsmouth and the government "should be doing more".

The Conservative leader also criticised the government for not investing more in defence....

A western official said that so far US bombers have not used the British bases of Diego Garcia or RAF Fairford - but said the UK was ready to accept them. The official said he expected them to arrive within the next few days.

Earlier, former Conservative Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said he thought the prime minister had "made a big misjudgement" by not allowing the US to use British military bases for offensive strikes on Iran.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that international law was "not settled on this issue" and depended on whether there was an imminent risk of attack from Iran.

Hunt said the Americans had a significant role in defending Europe and in this situation, "to weaken our alliance with the United States was a big mistake".

"President Trump is not interested in that rules-based order," Hunt said.

"He's said so absolutely explicitly. And we have to recognise the brute strength of the American military is something we depend on now in Europe and will depend on for at least a decade."

Hunt is obviously part of the reality-based system. 

A Major Victory on LCMs

 Benson v. U.S. (D.C.App. 2026) involved a probable ne'er-do-well charged with:

Benson was:

indicted for (1) possession of a “large capacity ammunition feeding device,” D.C. Code § 7-2506.01(b); (2) possession of an unregistered firearm, id. § 7-2502.01(a); (3) carrying a pistol without a license, id. § 22-4504(a); and (4) unlawful possession of ammunition, id. § 7-2506.01(a)(3).

Their summary conclusion:

To preview our answers to those  central questions, they are that 11+ magazines are unquestionably arms, they are in not only common but ubiquitous use for lawful purposes, and there is no history or tradition of blanket bans on arms in such common use, so that the District’s magazine capacity ban violates the Second Amendment. Third, we reject the District’s argument that Benson’s facial challenge to the District’s ban on 11+ magazines should nonetheless fail because he in fact possessed a magazine holding 30 rounds....

Magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition are ubiquitous in our country, numbering in the hundreds of millions, accounting for about half of the magazines in the hands of our citizenry, and they come standard with the most popular firearms sold in America today. Because these magazines are arms in common and ubiquitous use by law-abiding citizens across this country, we agree with Benson and the United States that the District’s outright ban on them violates the Second Amendment. See generally District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008); N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022).

In more detail deeper in the decision:

The District next counters on the merits that 11+ magazines, by themselves, are “practically harmless” and of “no use” without ammunition and a receiver (the firearm’s core component), so that magazines themselves are not arms. That is not a defensible approach to identifying what constitutes an arm—a gun is also practically harmless and of no use without ammunition, but it is still obviously an arm. The District’s position that magazines are not arms has a couple of glaring flaws. First, it ignores Bruen’s clear explanation that arms include “instruments that facilitate armed self-defense,” which magazines clearly do by reloading the gun and enabling semi-automatic firing. 597 U.S. at 28. Second, the District’s view reduces to the absurd proposition that legislatures can prohibit all of the core components of firearms—the trigger, the hammer, the slide, the firing pin, the sights, etc.—because none of them do much good without the others, and none of them is strictly necessary to a functioning firearm. See Duncan v. Bonta, 133 F.4th 852, 897 (9th Cir. 2025) (en banc) (Bumatay, J., dissenting), cert. pending, No. 25-198 (U.S. filed Aug. 15, 2025) (“[T]he Second Amendment’s protection of ‘Arms’ must extend to their functional components,” or “the Second Amendment would be a shallow right—easily infringed by indirect regulation.”); id. at 917 (Vandyke, J., dissenting) (“[U]nder that logic, basically every part of a firearm is an ‘optional component’” and thus “not protected under the Second Amendment.”).

Really encouraging reminder the changes President Trump brought to this:

The United States, which prosecuted Benson in the underlying case and defended the ban’s constitutionality in the initial round of appellate briefing, now concedes that this ban violates the Second Amendment.

One other point" this creates a circuit split with the federal courts of appeals  over this question. The Court now should hear the appeal of Duncan v. Bonta on this question.