Telescope Reviews: Calling all G11 owners

Curt - let me attempt to give you my perspective on this, having been down almost the exact road you're on right now.

I think that you may be confusing ease of operation "out of the box" with the idea of a "maintenance-free" mount. Hopefully I can separate these two concepts for you. Let's start with what I believe to be the myth of a "maintenance free" mount.

IMO, I seriously doubt that you'll ever find any piece of precision equipment that is completely maintenance free. If for no other reason than the fact that we live in a dusty and dirty world it's just a matter of time before any mount you own will need maintenance just to keep it clean internally. You wouldn't expect to buy a car and not maintain it, would you? The same is true of your mount, particularaly if you've laid out a lot of cash for one and you plan on keeping it for a long time.

So, IMO it's a given that no matter which mount you get, if you plan on keeping it for a very long time then eventually you'll need to clean and regrease it. Once you take it apart to do this then you're going to need to put it back together in at least as good a working order as you found it. This would be things like setting the worm gear mesh and the loading on the bearings correctly.

Seems to me that since the need for this is a given, we either have to:

learn how to maintain the mount ourselves
pay someone else to do it
or sell off the equipment (hopefully) before it is damaged or wears out from inattention

At the bottom line for me I realized that I don't want to have to to send my mount off to be maintained. I'll need to know how to maintain it myself. Once I resigned myself to this it turned out to be a major steering factor in my decision to purchase the G-11.

Now - about ease of operation "out of the box"... IMO at the bottom line this seems to be very much a matter of how much money you have to spend. Your budget is looking a lot like mine was - AFAIK, at that price point you're really looking at either a CGE or a G-11 if you're buying new. I do not think that either of these mounts has a real "out of the box" performance edge over the other when you get right down to it. I wish that I could tell you that at this price point you won't have any issues to overcome but I can't. Even though I had no complaints with the way the G-11 worked for me, others have not been so fortunate. You can read plenty of posts where folks were either pleased or troubled with the CGE, too. At the bottom line here I think that you'd have to spend a good deal more cash to have a better chance at getting something that works nearly perfectly "out of the box" - but at the ~$3500.00 price point the chances are certainly very good that you'll end up with a *perfectly acceptable* performance from your new mount. IMO, if your budget says $3500.00 then your expectations should be set accordingly - expect *perfectly acceptable*, not *perfect*. Chances are you'll be pleasantly suprised at how things work out.

Personally, I steered toward the G-11 on the basis of needing to maintain the mount over time. When I looked at the CGE and G-11 it seemed to me that the G-11 looked much easier to take apart and adjust than the CGE. Losmandy also sells pretty much every part on the mount as a "spare", too. I really like that - if anything breaks I should be able to fix it pretty easily.

I really liked my Atlas, but it wasn't the easiest mount to work on, and it I was never able to get replacement OEM parts for the internals, which annoyed me to no end. This was a major "tipping point" in my decision to get a new mount and I think that the G-11 will be much easier on me in this regard. The other thing that pushed me over the line was the desire to get into longer focal length, higher resolution astrophotography. You seem to be at the same point I was when I made the jump.

The G-11 is working just fine for me in this regard. I have an SBIG ST2000XCM and with my C9 at f/6.3 the resolution comes in at just over 1 arcsecond per pixel. It's a really sweet spot for galaxies and such. Here's what the setup can do with 10 minute exposures and an hour's worth of time:

Since 10 minutes is well over the worm's period, you can literally expose as long as you need to. That's *perfectly acceptable* performance for me...

Charlie