EARTH & COSMOS
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EARTH & COSMOS |
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CGE Mount |
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| I bought this mount as a replacement to my EQ6 mount. It was part of a package to buying the C14, but it was pretty obvious that given the size of the C14 the EQ6 would not cut it. |
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| Build Quality and Features This is one hell of a mount. Not the largest by any stretch but large enough. It breaks down into 4 separate pieces. The shaft comes away from the head, the head away from the pier and the pier away from the tripod. The shaft is made from one piece of stainless steel. The head itself is quite heavy and a similar size to the G11 from Losmandy; in fact it is most likely a clone of the G11 given the history of Losmandy and Celestron. The drives are self contained and around 5 inches in diameter. Movement of the alt and azimuth is conducted via allen key lugs which move very easily compared to the EQ6. The saddle plate on the top of the head is compatible with Losmandy or ADM sized dove tail plates. The dove tail itself features double locks and this has come in handy on a couple of occasions. Clutches are the double variety which makes for good grip on either side of the scope. The pier contains all the electronics with two auxillary ports, one guide port, one hand control port, one PC port and Dec/RA control ports. The tripod is huge and is very heavy, which provides great stability. The mount is bolted together with allen key type bolts. |
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Use I have used this mount for visual and guided uses. Despite the advertised +/- 10 arc seconds PE I have found it to be a little better than that, but it really depends on which side of the meridian as to how good the periodic error really is. At very high resolution planetary imaging (typically 14,000mm plus) the drift in PE is not overly bad. I get several minutes before I need to place the planet back into the centre of the chip. In terms of guided photography the mount performs very well on the western side of the mount. With 15 minute subs the mount produces lovely tight stars with autoguiding. You have to ensure though that the mount is just a little off balanced to achieve these results. On the eastern side of the mount the guiding is another story. It will regularly produce oval stars for no apparent reason. I cannot think of a single reason why this happens other than perhaps counter balance is fairly particular on this side fo the mount. Doing a polar alignment though this mount is made a little more difficult if you live in the southern hemisphere. The mount has softare for polar alignment but it is only for Polaris and not sigma octans. That said though, polar alignment is easy and can be done very quickly with drift alignment procedures. It would be nice though to have a polar scope to get reasonably close first. The tripod though has some flaws. Yes it is big and sturdy, but the legs do tend to slip a little with the C14 sitting on top. I have had to lock off the legs very tight at astro camps and even then it sometimes slips. The problem really revolves around the fact that there is one bolt just pushing onto the inner leg. It really needs a compression style clamp instead. Dew can also be a bit of a problem with the electrical connections. While they look pretty good, I found that using a squirt of CRC seems to keep the moisture out and prevent little things like response 16 & 17. This problem can be pretty annoying when you are imaging the planets on a night of near perfect seeing and then you suddenly get these warnings. I am sure you can imagine what my thoughts and mutterings were on that night. Final Comments For the price these mounts work really well and are really beefy. They hold a good size payload of 65 lbs or 29.5 kg. Worth looking at for sure and still easy enough to setup at viewing nights or star parties. Some parts of the mount could do with improving but generally it is worth obtaining. |
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