Due to personal reasons, I had to stop the hobby for a while. When I came back to the hobby sometime in 2008, I started to look for a mount to replace the William Optics GT-1 (the SS2k was not working well for me as it would always drift in Dec after a one star alignment.), after some serious consideration I decided to go for the Mach1GTO. The mount is not avaliable for immediate order and I placed myself on the Astro-Physics waiting list on 8th March 2009. On 17th Dec 2009 I received an email from Astro-Physics that the mount is ready for ordering. I send in my order to Astro-Physics on 21st Dec 2009 and the mount was ready to ship to me on 3th March 2010. Now after using the Astro-physics Mach1GTO for close to 1 year, I do not look at or desire anything else (within it's class). It cost a lot but it works perfectly out of the box. There is no need to tweak anything. For imaging the Astro-Physics line is well worth every cent spend. The built-in polar alignment routine in the keypad is quick and easy to follow. It allows you to start polar alignment before end of astronomical twilight. Using the built in routine, a typical polar alignment could be complete in less than 20mins and yet be sufficiently accurate to allow 5-10mins unguided exposure yielding nice round stars. This feature is very important as polaris is too low to be visible hence making polar alignment scopes useless here.

 

Raw PE (10 worm cycles) on Mach1GTO (data acquired with PEMPRO)

PE after PEC (8 worm cycles) on Mach1GTO (data acquired with PEMPRO)

RAW PE and PE with PEC on Mach1GTO (curve fitting with PEMPRO)

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Last revised: April 12, 2011.