Problem with Motors - CG5 Goto mount - HELP!!

Hi, I was out last night trying to do some photography with my C80ED mounted on my motorised cg5 mount. As you saw before, I posted some shots whereby I could get away with 2 minute exposures unguided with no tracking errors.

Last night was a differrent story, I spent a painful hour and a half polar aligning, and all the routine in setting up. As soon as I pressed the hand control to go to my target, the motors would make a large 'clicking' sound in both axes :evil: This was never like this before. I tried everything, but it seems that It atakes a second or so for the motor to move after the hugely audible clicking sound.

I tried the anti backlash thingy on the hand controller, but no joy. All I get on a 30 second exposure is consistent star streaks for top left to bottom right. It seems as if the motors have banged out of whak or something, they seem very 'loose'

I have been very careful with the mount, it's just this damned 'clicking' before the motor will engage. Please HELP!! :x

From the now mentally unstable Keith.....

Keith - I'm not familiar with the CG5 mount and I'm not sure I can offer you anything constructive. But here's some possible ides to check:

1. Check battery/power supply is OK to both mount and hand controller
2. Check clutches are not too loose
3. Check scope is firmly mounted
4. If you can, check the mesh between worm and gear - inititally just RA will do. You might be able to do this simly by tightening the clutches right down then grasp the telescope or mounting plate and see if there is any play when you try to move it.

I'm not sure if any of this will help but it might give you a checklist of things to look at...

Hope you get to the root of it soon for the sake of your sanity

Cheers

Dave

Cheers Dave, thanks for the quick reply !

2. Check clutches are not too loose

I assume these are the two release knobs to move both axes quickly and manually?
I just remembered, while I had the motor going, I released these last night to quicky slew to my target, and then retightened them, instead of slew via hand controller. Could this have caused a large amount of mechanical play in the gears?

Anyways, I'll check everything you mentioned here today..
Keith..

Keith, the two clutches on both axes must be tight so that there is no slipping...otherwise it will not be tracking or slewing properly.......If the problem keeps up I would just get rid of that mount,seems to be a lot of problems with these mounts so I'm bailing out

SOunds like they're the ones. It certainly could cause what you saw if you didn't tighten them down enough after loosening them. Loosening the mount shouldn't result in a loosening of the worm/gear mesh though...

Again, not sure how your mount works but with the AP, if I loosen the clutches and move the scope by hand, the hand controller still thinks its in the old position because it uses the movement of the motors/gears to figure out where its pointing. That of course causes problems though with the AP I can do a 're- synch' or 're-cal' on the new object.

That said, its unlikley to cause stars to streak - only the goto function - since polar alignment hasn't changed.

It could be that you had the clutches too lightly set and there was a constant slippage introduced.

Let us know if this fixes the problem you saw.

Cheers and good luck!

Dave

Hi Keith,

I have the same mount and it's been a source of numerous problems. In fact I have a similar problem to yours. Consistently get star streaks using my webcam at F6.8 on the 70mm refractor at only 5 seconds! I too used to be able to get two minutes shots (even on a F12 Maksutov). I also have heard clicking from time to time - not recently though.
I dissasembled the motor housing to look at the gear mesh but everything seemed hunky dory.

Trying to get autoguiding working (with the NexImage) to see if it will help.

I had a similar problem before and it was fixed for a short while after resetting to factory defaults and re-inputting the location data, but haven't been able to test this out with the skies we've had recently - I really should have tried this last night - will try again tonight.

One thing I noticed last night about this mount is that if the RA clutch is locked down all the way is that it will scrape of the plastic surround on the mount, audibly straining the motors. Could this be happening to you? I did get better gotos, but still poor tracking when I loosened it a bit.

Very frustrating spending most of the time working on gettting the equipment in working order, rather than observing eh?

Celestron support have been no help either.

I have no doubt that the asgt mount is good. Alot of users have very positive reports about it. Some though end up with problems like ours.

Anyway, if I get mine sorted tonight I'll let you know what I did.

Trev