BOTTOME LINE: buy this thing now! Full Review: My first attempt using this was a disaster. was ready to return the product. The manual is well out of date (lists the Hand controller with a phone jack port, its actually a usb mini which is awesome, and many other examples). I bout this for astrophotography for my celestron AVX and CGEM mounts. I have an edgeHD 8 OTA, and a 4.25in stellavue triplet apo. I followed hte instructions as best I could accounting for it being well out of date, as there have been many firm ware upgrades since the instructions were writing, and it needs a massive update. The most critical error is the first few lints of the instructions says to not bother leveling the mount. This will be prove to be my undoing. First night I went exactly by the directions in the book, and this thing was so inaccurate I was enraged. Stayed up to 3am on a work night as I couldn't let it go, power cycling and re aligning, adding 10 ref points to the 4 points it takes automatically, and this thing was 100s of arc minutes off. It was bad. My first concern was the steps listed in the manual did not automatically occur as it was listed. For instance there option to set the date and time, location, etc did not pop up, luckily I have experience with the mounts already and knew how to jump through menus and make these adjustments, but Im on the east coast and it defaults to California. But its worth the trouble to have the usb interface on the HC. The most egregious error was the instructions state you do not have to level the scope. You dont have to polar align the scope (this is true). Night # 2 I decide to give it one more go before sending this thing back, and OHHH am I glad I did. I decided to use my normal setup routine for when I use the 2+4 manual alignment procedure, so I levels the scope ( use use a 10" 3$ level from harbor freight) which only takes like 2 minutes of extra time adusting the tripod leg lengths, I did a cursory polar alignment with my polar alignment scope, wasnt dark so this was not very accurate, I made sure date and time were correct and they were, turn on the mount, it takes about 20 secs for it to give me the message that the mount has synced with the camera, it says press align to start the alignment, so I do. I sit back and it about 90-120 secs, it slews on its on to 4 areas of they sky, stopping for 15-30 secs on each to take a pic, of course you dont see this pic, but the HC LED display keeps you constantly updated on what its doing, including the % complete while its calculating the stars it discovered to its database, and how many stars it sees in each frame. If the scope points towards something blocking the sky, such as my house, it quickly identifies this and moves to a new area. After the initial automated process, it suggests for astrophotography purposes, but I decided to slew to Virgo just to see how accurate this was, and BAM, damn near top dead center. U use backyard EOS and a canon T5i, and in the frame and focus panel of BYEOS, this thing was just at tiny bit off center, I dont know the arc secs or arc minutes, but it was about 4 widths of the star virgo on the screen. THis was darn near as accurate as my manual aligment process. Slew to orion nebula. WIth my scope and the focal reducer, with teh T5i, orion takes up 1/2 the field of view on the photo, its a little off center, i set the motor to speed of 3, move a bit, snap a pic, now I know what directions to go, move the other way a few times while snapping pics, and boom its now dead center. I took 60 second exposures, oh head theres drift, so I polar align, then let it manually re-align, I slew to orion, was a litte off, move away from orion and added a ref point, moved to the other side of orion, new ref pt, did this 4 total times (took like 2 mins), and autoslew back to Orion and BAM, it was perfect. I actually moved the scope just to take it off center for visual asthetics. 60 sec exposures, no problem with the alignment, but i live in Athens GA, and the light pollution is so bad I had to cut back to 45 sec exposures. To review: Once the scope is leveled and balanced, i fire this thing up, 20 sec wait for software to load, I click one button, sit back and drink a beer until the scope stops moving (~ 2 mins), I move to the object I want to photograph, I then add 3-4 extra ref points, slew back to that object and then use the star to polar align. The polar alignment takes just about 2 mins for me to adjust the scope with manual knobs to get the star in the cross hairs. Now I auto align again (2 mins), move to a target, add 4 ref pts (2 mins), and off I freakin go. What just a few nights ago took me literally 1 hour, and this hour mind you was spent laying ont eh cold ground on my back siting starts, torquing my neck, crawling on my hands and knees to visually get these starts in my view finder to to the alignment manually... now the whole damn shabang takes 15 mins, and I do it from the comfort of a chair w/o having to put down my beer. I have used the scope every night, as I dont have to worry about the 30 min scope setup time and the 1 hour alignment, polar alignment, and realignment jsut to be killed by clouds taking out the sky and negating my efforts. The times this saves me allows me to photograph on work nights and be in bed by 11pm, to get up before work and get a few shots of an item in the wrong season, I could not be more thrilled. If this is compatible with your mount BUY IT NOW. Heres the pic:
