Morning Gerhard Thanks for your email. I would think your questions are not off topic as it is related to visual tracking of satellites. I agree with your comment about the prices charged locally by the so called agents - go direct is a lot cheaper- eg I recently got a colour CCD camera for a friend from overseas for less than half the price charged locally. The Cube looks interesting- there is a review in a recent issue of the magazine SKY AND TELESCOPE and it appeared to be a good buy. Unfortunately the IOPTRON web site is a bit vague about ASCOM and PC control so just how much control one has over the unit is currently unknown, eg will Brents freeware SAT TRACKER program drive it ? It would also appear that only the CUBE GPS models support ASCOM and PC connections. As to what telescope to use - well that depends on what you want to do. I guess you are not interested in video work which makes things a bit easier. For satellite tracking you want maximum aperture with the largest possible field of view. The CUBE is not a heavy duty mount - it has plastic gears - when I originally mentioned it on SeeSat I was thinking in terms of it carrying a video camera only. The 80mm aperture refractor sold with the mount for $410 looks like a reasonable deal but just how good the refractor is is not obvious since again IOPTRON dont say much about it. Usually reflectors are cheaper than a refractor-aperture for aperture- and a maksutov cass is usually reletavely long focus which means small field of view so I personally would look for a reflector in the range 5 to 6 inch aperture at around f/5 or so. I think Kevin uses a 4 inch refractor on his GOTO mount (Celestron?) so Im sure he could add some useful info here. The nine speed setting should be adequate for most satellites -- but the burning question here is can the Cube be programmed to track satellites? or at the least be commanded to go to a particular RA/Dec (or alt/az) setting. So whilst the CUBE looks interesting there are a lot of unanswered questions so its up to someone to take the plunge and try it :-)). For about $400 (plus perhaps customs duty etc) I think it looks a good buy but please nobody shoot me if it turns out to be less than required! Cheers Greg ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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