We used the 6" f8 refractor on the CGE mount to look at Arcturus, M3, and M13.  The got worked well except for power outages due to the poor power cord - a new one is on the way with a screw down plug which should fix accidental cutoffs.  The ground connection still needs improvement.  I still have not ordered a new battery or DC supply to run the telescope.  The fact that the scope does well so far may make that purchase more urgent.  It is nice to have the scope working as well as it does.

During the telescope set up the puppies were born. Shadow had 3 black and 1 brown puppy in the early evening. 

I also removed the IR cut filter from the old Nikon D70. This was easier to do than expected, but the focus at infinity is unreachable now for at least some of the Nikon lenses.  On a telescope it is not a problem, but I may have to try a replacement filter if I want to do wide field H-alpha exposures with a camera lens. 

I've been reviewing my start atlases to see which ones are most useful.  I also purchased The Astrophotography Sky Atlas by Charles Bracken while considering using the CGE mount to do astrophotography with an DSLR piggybacked on the telescope.  Bracken's atlas is interesting but exasperating at the same time.  I think it is the self publishing aspect of the atlas which stands out when you examine the charts.  In contrast to the wonderfully designed Pocket Sky Atlas the charts are hard to read at a glance.  The labels are not on both sides of the chart and star labels are pale grey where they exist at all.  The color choices are shades of magenta and most of the smaller objects are not scaled up enough to be distinguishable from stars which makes figuring out what the large labels refer to hard when you  don't know which dot-like thing it is labeling.  On the other hand the tables are quite nice, but if it were merely tables you could transfer them to a spreadsheet so it was the combination of charts and tables that ought to be better thought out in the work.  The charts are, as best I can tell, computer generated by the author and the book really needs a graphic designer and printer's touch.  Nice and useful, but it could be better.

I've pulled the Celestron CGE out of storage.  After buying it on Cloudy Nights as a non-working mount a couple of years ago, the covid lockdown has given me more time at home to mess with it.  It turns out that the mount powers up and with hand controller works fine, but the limit switches are not working or at least are not recognized on startup.  I discovered that this is fairly easy to bypass though: Press "enter" to begin startup.  Interrupt the start up slew before mount hits anything by pressing any of the four arrow keys on the hand controller. Position the mount at the correct switch position as best as possible manually. Now hit "undo" to accept the switch position as valid.  From this point on the mount acts normally and you can finish the initialization process.  Now you have goto and access to the catalog data in the handset.  A few caveats, I would not try a slew to anything below the horizon (remember the limit switches are not going to save you) and tracking near zenith needs to be watched as well since the switches won't stop the clock drive from running the mount into itself if you go through the meridian.  All in all I'm happy with this.  While I try to figure out the underlying issues with the switches I can still use the mount. 

The Moon