Mounts

    The Celestron CG-5 mount has worked well for me.  As my first computerized mount, the learning curve on how to use the functions in the hand control, or to be able to make adjustments and fully utilze it's capabilities, has not been very steep at all.

    The mount's 'go-to' capabilites after doing a two-star alignment + four calibration stars, is excellent.  Better with a polar alignment and very precise after you do a drift alignment followed by Celesron's alignment procedure.

    This mount holds it's own while tracking.  There are three preset tracking speed options in the hand control firmware, sidereal, lunar and solar, plus the tracking speed can also be manually adjusted as well.

    Currently, as you can see, I don't have a small observatory.  At 75lbs, when loaded with the C9.25, it is still light enough for me to "hug-up" and pack it about 50 feet to my observing/imaging location in my back yard.

    For my purposes so far, this has been an excellent mount to use for observing, and also it has does well enough for astro-photography when used with an auto-guider.

For more technical info on this mount see the links below.

http://www.celestron.com/c3/home.php

http://www.nexstarsite.com/index.html

The Cge Pro

    After a few years of imaging and enjoying the night sky with my CG-5, I was able to upgrade to a Celestron CGE Pro mount.  This mount is extremely much more capable of carrying the Celestron C9.25 SCT, especially for astrophotography.

    I will add, even though it comes with a tripod, I wouldn't want to be setting it up and taking it down repeatedly night after night.  Take notice in the above photo, it was very soon mounted on a pier.

    It's ease of use is the same as the CG-5 and it's pointing accuracy is impecable. Even at a F ratio of F/20 it will put an object almost dead center of my camera's FOV.

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