Here is Allan Gould's Autostar retrofit project down under in Australia and some
of his
astrophotography with it.
Here are photos of the CG5 mount and a screenshot from Astrosnap which
I had a look
at the periodic error of the DS motors over about a 10 minute interval. There is
very little
periodic error using this setup with the DS motors. I was wrapped to say the least.
Also
from the
arrangement of the motors there is very little chance of a motor clash. With the
4" scope I
was able to take good CCD shots with this setup.
Click here to see my periodic error measurement.
I decided to mount the Dec motor with a small plate to attach it to the head
of the mount
toward the front end of the scope and since I was worried about collisions if I
did a
straight through connection to the RA drive, I found two well made plastic gears
(from a
miniature racing car) and used these to connect the RA motor to the RA worm
drive.
Works very neatly as I tucked up the motor into the space vacated by the old Chinese
RA motor.
-Allan Gould
Last night I had a break in the clouds and thought that I would try out the
mount. It easily
carries my 102mm refractor or 127mm Maksutov or 5" refractor mounted
separately.
Also the 4" + 5" Maksutov on the same plate (ie a dual mount setup)
with no problems.
I then used Astrosnap to chart the PE after polar aligning through the 4"
refractor. Believe
it or not the motors are superb. One pixel drift over all in Dec after 10
minutes and NO
discernable PE in RA. Couldn't believe it. So I took a 60 sec shot of the Jewel
Box in
Crux - No drift at all. Really am chuffed with the setup now. The RA alignment
as from
AutoStar is slightly in error but that may be due to loading the wrong patch
into the
program.