Schmidt-Cassegrain Teleskop SC 203/2032 CPC 800 GoTo

CPC800 owners review

( 4 / 5 )

I’ve had my CPC800 for a couple of years now and, on the whole, I still really like it and enjoy using it.
I can recommend it, but see below.

The plus points:
• It provides a very steady image, with any vibration dying down very quickly, due to the beefy fork mount and excellent tripod
• Nice accessory tray with room for 3 eyepieces
• Well finished
• Can be adjusted for comfortable observing anywhere in the sky
• Slews reasonably fast
• Nice optics
• Alignment usually works well
• The list of pre-programmed objects is excellent and the information available on the handset display for various objects isn’t bad
• There is a ‘tour’ function - if you want to see the highlights visible on a particular evening
• GoTo usually works well, although sometimes it seems to slip in alt and becomes less and less accurate
• It holds collimation pretty well and is easy to collimate (even without buying ‘Bob’s Knobs’!)

The minus points:
• It’s rather heavy - I have to take out the tripod first and then the ‘scope on its fork mount, it’s no grab-n-go! But you that when you buy it.
• The finder scope would have been much more useful if it had come with a star diagonal –alignment is a real neck and back killer if you use stars at higher elevations
• The focusing system moves the main mirror and has a lot of ‘mirror shift’. The solution is to add a separate focuser, but that is not cheap! The advantage is that there is a lot of back focus
• Cool-down time is in the order of 45 mins to an hour, but I sometimes get the feeling the image could be improved if it had a built-in fan to get rid of any tube currents
• I’d like to take it to dark sites, but I’ve now had two of the 12V power packs, one from Baader Planaterium and one from Astroshop.de, and they both gave up the ghost - so I now only run it in the garden using the mains transformer that came with it
• The power cable plugs into the control panel which then rotates with the scope which leads to possible damage to the plug when it’s yanked out of the socket (it’s happened to me once so far). There is a setting to avoid this (the scope rotates so far and then reverses itself to avoid damaging the cable – useful, but means finding a target can take longer if it needs to reverse)