Hello,
We are looking for a replacement mount to ou venerable Professional mount from 1950's which sits in our astronomy club dome .
This mount weights about 500kg but has more and more mechanical issues.
Sitting on the mount is a large iron table weighting about 30kg, on which are tandem mounted a C14 Edge HD and a 400mm carbon tube Newton scope weighting about 40kg. We can add a guidescope or small refractor in between the two main instruments. This means about 100kg instrument payload.
We use this mount either for all night astrophotography work or to receive public for visual observations. We need a mount that can "instant ON" point for visual use, since we cannot have visitors wait for the observing session to start, and accurate enough for guided astrophotography work at the 4m focal length of the C14.
We have the chance to have on this 1600m altitude site pretty good seeing, routinely below 2 arc-sec and got some raw images with FWHM below 1 arc-sec, so we don't want to spoil this seeing with inaccurate guiding.
In the Paramount line, which mount would you recommend for our target use?
Clear skies
Antoine