I’ve been planning for more than a year now to get an observatory build going on some property my wife and I own. It’s not quite been started, but will very soon now. In prep for what will be a 12 x 16 foot dual pier observatory with roll off roof, I got another premium mount. I plan on using my 10Micron GM1000, and the AP Mach 2 in the observatory. One will run the EdgeHD 11 telescope, and I’m toying with the Epsilon as the second telescope. This leaves me my smaller scopes to run on the Rainbow Astro mount in the back yard and when traveling.

The Mach 2 arrived about 4 weeks ago, and my first light actually had a hardware issue with the DEC encoder that couldn’t be fixed by myself, so it had to make a quick trip back to AP for a repair, and return. It’s back and working great.

I ran a 3 point polar alignment with NINA, which got me to 1° of polar error. I probably could have tweaked it a little bit better, but thought that was good enough. Without any model, the guiding is pretty spectacular as you can see in the graph above.

I have a lot of thoughts on the AP Mach 2 and how it compares to the 10Micron mount. The service experience, the hardware, the software. There are major differences in these two mounts, and they both have problems, and both have excellent points as well. After a few more imaging sessions I’m going to write up a pretty detailed comparison on the two mounts. (I finally got the time to write about both here.)

First target with the setup is M33.