ioptron ZEQ25

I was thinking about buying one of these to guide my camera and possibly an OTA at a later time. Is this a good choice or is there something better with GOTO? I'm mainly interested in galaxy's, nebula and other deep space fuzzies. I know I'll need an auto guider at some point.

yes it is good. With a 2-minute polar alignment I can get 2-3 minute unguided subs at 300mm with a 1.6x crop sensor.

As far as going forward, keep in mind the weight limits. Although the specs say 27 pounds you should cut that in half for long exposure work above 300mm. A small refractor telescope at a later time should be ok but you have to take into account all items aboard, camera, scope, guider, etc. Overload will work against you and could damage or shorten the life of the mount.

I did buy a ZEQ25 and was very disappointed with it. There are lots of good reviews so I guess I got one built on Monday morning by someone hungover. There was just so much wrong with it and their customer service was non-existent. So I sent it back (after working on it for over 40 hours). I ended up buying an orion atlas EQ-G. It worked great right out of the box. I'll probably get flamed for this but the EQ-G makes the ZEQ-25 look like a toy (even if it had worked).

DanThoman wrote in post #16819569
I did buy a ZEQ25 and was very disappointed with it. There are lots of good reviews so I guess I got one built on Monday morning by someone hungover. There was just so much wrong with it and their customer service was non-existent. So I sent it back (after working on it for over 40 hours). I ended up buying an orion atlas EQ-G. It worked great right out of the box. I'll probably get flamed for this but the EQ-G makes the ZEQ-25 look like a toy (even if it had worked).

No doubt the Atlas is much more robust and advanced for deep sky work. It's also twice the cost and weight so it may not be an option if portability and budget are factors. The Atlas is a solid performer at that price point for sure. It's a good choice if telescopes, guiding and possibly piggy-backing are in the plan. Congratulations Dan, looking forward to seeing your photos.

Thanks Steve. Four times out and the mount has performed flawlessly. Now I need to go someplace I can actually polar align it. I don't have a polaris view here.

DanThoman wrote in post #16826531
Thanks Steve. Four times out and the mount has performed flawlessly. Now I need to go someplace I can actually polar align it. I don't have a polaris view here.

what was wrong with your ZEQ?

Where to start. The polar scope was not properly aligned and it is very difficult to fix on this mount. I would have to send it back to ioptron. The polar scope had grease on the front lens which I guess didn't matter since it was unusable anyway. The wires between the RA board and the main board were to short. If you properly adjusted the tension on the ra axis it pulled the connector lose. There should have been two springs to tension each axis. The dec had two the ra had one. Tech support said "well, you don't really need two." That was not an acceptable answer.

Another major problem was when I unscrewed the ra board and shimmed it so the the connector wouldn't come loose and I could actually try the scope I could never get it to align properly. When I tried to slew to an object after a three star alignment it wouldn't be in the field of view with a 40mm eyepiece. After a three star alignment with the EQ-G every object was within the field of view using a 10mm eyepiece.

There were several other problems all of which I can't remember.