EAA with Geoptik EQ Platform

While traveling, I ordered the Geoptik EQ platform from Teleskop-express.de - my single most expensive piece of equipment. I was expecting it to take weeks to arrive but it arrived within days while I was still away. I got them to retry the delivery again today. I got it around lunch time. It was quite heavy (16 kg). I spent some time setting it up for San Francisco's latitude. I also ran it during the day without a telescope. It is more noisy than my Astrothingy platform and I feared it might be vibrating. Also it did not use a belt like described on the website. Instead there are teeth on the rotating axes and the top moving blade. Interestingly it has two motors.

Given the clear skies, I decided to try it in the evening. I was hoping to image some targets in Sagittarius but unfortunately there were clouds in that direction and also the moon was not very far (in Scorpius).

Instead I decided to image targets in Cygnus using the L-Enhance filter. After a quick polar align - lining up the "centered" platform/telescope with the 0 deg meridian, I turned on the platform and adjusted the speed while pointing to a bright star. The movement did not look very smooth.

I stared with C27 Crescent Nebula, tried 8s frames, then 5s and finally 4s. Afterwards I moved to C33 East Veil Nebula, but clouds started moving in. I kept going for a few more targets increasing the subframe time to 6s but getting a lot of bad frames. After running the captured frames through my stackfit.js script, I got decent results given the conditions.

Observations