The Sphinx Professional (SXP) is the most powerful mount from the legendary Sphinx range by Vixen: ideal for demanding astro-photographers!
A stepper motor with 250 pulses per second is used in the SXP mount. This ensures a smooth and very precise operation. You will be surprised how quiet the mount is even at high speed, and how quickly it responds to your input! 15 bearings in the axes of the SXP are responsible for this.
- Highly accurate tracking: The precise NC machined right ascension and declination wheels have 180 teeth and a diameter of 72mm. The worm gear is made of brass.
- The declination axis has a diameter of 40mm and, like the right ascension axis, made of stable carbon steel. This ensures that this compact mount can carry a load of up to 16kg with high rigidity and precession.
- Because of the design of the Sphinx mount you need relatively little counterweight. In this way the SXP remains portable even under high loads.
- The periodic error can be save in order to make the tracking even more precise.
- In addition, the SXP has a freely configurable Meridian offset.
The Starbook Ten is much more than a hand controller with GoTo functionality!
Here are a few features of this extraordinary astronomy computer
- Large colour LCD monitor: The Starbook Ten's monitor has a 5-inch TFT colour liquid crystal display with high WVGA (800×480 pixels, 65,535 colours) resolution. During astronomical observations at night, the observer's eyes adapt to the darkness. For this reason, the display can be switched to red backlighting. The red light does not interfere with this adaptation to darkness as much as white light. All command and direction buttons can be illuminated in red so that you can keep track of them even in the dark. The illuminated buttons can be switched on or off.
- Moon map: You can view a map of the visible part of the moon on the screen. All important landmarks on the moon's surface are highlighted and can be selected for the GoTo function.
- Fast CPU: The Starbook Ten has a CPU with a clock speed of 324 MHz, which is about 5 times faster than the CPU of the old Starbook. This means that the star chart loads faster and makes the screen more vivid.
- Simple menu: With the Starbook Ten, you can call up your celestial bodies in both scope and chart mode. You can also select your objects by scrolling through the star chart in chart mode. Frequently used menus can be found on each of the ten buttons. This allows you to quickly and easily access the most important functions directly at the touch of a button.
- Large database: The Starbook Ten contains more than 270,000 celestial objects, including 258,977 stars from the SAO star catalogue, 109 Messier objects, 7,840 objects and NGC 5386 IC objects, the sun, the moon and the planets of our solar system. Simply call up objects using their common names.
- P-PEC function: You can store a periodic error correction to improve the tracking accuracy of the mount. This is stored and retained even when you switch off the instrument and start it up again the next time.
- Hunting for satellites and comets: You can enter the orbital elements of a satellite or comet directly into the Starbook via a PC's LAN connection. You can store up to 10 satellites or comets in your Starbook.
- User-defined objects: The Starbook Ten is capable of storing user-defined objects. This allows you to store other interesting celestial objects that you would like to observe or photograph. You can enter the position data of up to 10 objects directly or via the LAN connection of a PC.
- Different tracking speeds: It is possible to change the tracking rate depending on the type of object you are observing. The movement of the sun, moon, planets or comets can be tracked at different speeds.
- Advanced alignment algorithm: You can achieve precise alignment of the mount by simply moving to two stars at least ten degrees apart and saving their positions. You can enter the position data of up to twenty stars on the control. If you save additional stars for alignment within ten degrees, the control will notify you in the dialogue box, as this would not result in more accurate positioning.
- Starbook Ten has a large backup memory in which your information can be stored. This allows you to switch off the instrument and save the batteries. When the mount resumes operation, the data remains stored.
- Atmospheric refraction: This option allows you to compensate for or reduce atmospheric refraction on celestial objects near the horizon.
- Cross Over Meridian: The mount has a safety feature that rotates the optical tube in the opposite direction when the observation object reaches its highest position to prevent the optics from hitting the mount. However, you can freely select or disable this feature if you want to take photographs with your equipment.
The Starbook Ten also has an expansion slot where you can add an additional module. With the optional module, you can operate an autoguider for automatic object tracking during photography.
