Stephen Paul wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...

wrote:

this is very intriguing, but how long do the other (non goto)
mounts
take to set up?

An alt az mount with no electronics and a tak sky 90 takes at most
ten
seconds to set up. For something that light you could leave it
assembled and take it out in one piece.

www.universalastronomics.com

The UniStar Light Deluxe or the MicroStar are one good solution.

I'm using a Unistar Light on an older Vixen wood leg tripod with the
accessory tray removed for quick foldup. It can handle my Vixen 102F9
ED (8
lbs+eyepiece and finder weight) with only a little difficulty during
focusing. I'm about to pull the 102 and drop an ED80 on it though,
which I
expect will be rock solid, and easier to carry through the door than
the 33"
long 102F9 :-).

The UniStar Light and the Vixen tripod together weigh about 12 lbs.
Add a
Sky90, and you've got something around 20 pounds that carries out in
one
trip.

The nice thing about smaller aperture scopes, is that most of what
they can
show, can be found pretty easily in "Dob and chart" mode. I use mine
to get
a quick look at all those objects I can find by memory, with maybe
just a
little sweeping around.

Putting it on a GoTo completely defeats the purpose. There is no such
thing
as a "quick look" GoTo. Grab and Go, sure, but quick look, no way. It
just
doesn't ever work out to be that easy, IME.

In fact, with the 102ED, my GEM GoTo sees a "Quick Align" about 90%
of the
time. Going for those three stars is just more work than I want to do
most
nights that I go out for an hour to look at a planet, or to poke
around at
some doubles, bright nebula, opens, or larger globulars. Instead I
just do a
quick polar scope polar alignment, get the mount into the home
alignment
position, and turn on the clock drive by selecting the Quick Align
option.
Then I slew the RA and Dec with the controller to point and look.

GoTo, I can take it or leave it. No big deal. Especially for small
apertures.

That's my take,
Stephen Paul
Shirley, MA


I suppose a better question would be: which takes longer for a goto
mount setup or cooldown.