Old Celestron C8 on a clock drive mount

[vk6kb]

Greetings all,
I have a couple of old Celestar fork and wedge clock mounts and a 30+ yr old C8.
I was wanting to put it to some use in the Observatory and wondered how to best use it with any sort of computer aided tracking / Guiding ?
It will really only be used when the main scope ( an Esprit 120 ED ) is busy on some other target.
I know I can put it on a AM3 or AM5 mount but wondered if the original fork mount and drive has been adapted.
I should add it will be pier mounted, no tripod needed.
Cheers
Keith

[Gordon]

Hi Keith,

That sounds like an interesting project. I don't have a clue how you would do that but maybe one of our other members can help!

[yobbo89]

have a look at onstep if you need to update the motors and electronics in your fork mount, onstep is the goto for diy opensource telescope tracking and conversions, it does other features as well like auto focus controll and rotator, you just need a little maths with the belt pulleys .

you'll see the navigation menu on the right side of the page, you may need to know how to solder for some of the pcb designs, but you should be able to find some older designs that are plug and play .
https://onstep.groups.io/g/main/wiki/3861


https://onstep.groups.io/g/main/wiki/28526

https://onstep.groups.io/g/main/wiki/28525


it looks like some people are doing pre assembled kits, this one seems ok, um i would fold the cap down under the real time clock battery ..

https://graydigitalarts.com/product/maxesp3/


https://graydigitalarts.com/product/maxesp4/


https://graydigitalarts.com/product-cat ... nstep-pcb/

i'm building a harmonic gear mount using an older pcb desighn that's not documented on the onstep site, so my knowledge on onstep is not alot at the moment . um i think you can just use some 3d printer motherboards for onstep aswell, i've built the open astro tracker and have used the MKS Gen L V2.0. which i'm pretty sure uses onstep ,open astro tracker used a pre configured program to flash the settings.

https://onstep.groups.io/g/main/wiki/3996
https://onstep.webnode.page/mks-gen-l-v2-1/