Fun fact, Richard used to be at celestron, and the planewave cdk20 started its life as the celestron c20 astrograph. The losmandy G11 also started its life as the celestron G11, by losmandy, before being available with losmandy only branding
The interesting thing is if you compare Planewave with other mount manufacturer like Astrophysics or 10 Micron, the performance is really great bang for the buck. The price might be similar in weight capacity, but what other mount can do 50°/s slew rate with built in 16 bit absolute encoder, not much. For amateur astronomer the cost might be steep, but for educational and research purposes it looks appealing. Just look how many L mounts in remote observatories, they're everywhere like blooming mushroom 😅
While I don't have that kind of money, I have often made the analogy about how someone will spend 50k on a classic car, so me spending 5k on a rig is cheap. (I keep telling myself that!)
0:43 most people don't make that much in a year. I'm just grabbing a mirror set from global optics that comes with the cell and spider for a good price and just build the rest myself. It's like 800$ for a 8 inch f8 set and 1400$ or so for a 10 inch f8, its way better than the off the shelf price. I'm actually thinking of making a mount but I sure as heck won't be using custom units standardized steppers and gearboxes exist for a reason.
Great video! But every single time I watch one of your videos, there are semi-regular brief "stutters" in the soundtrack, they are not extremely frequent, but frequent enough that they are kind of annoying...