New Mount: 10Micron GM1000 - Cables and boxes

One of the disadvantages of the 10Micron mount is that it doesn't have any through-the-mount-cabling. I.e. I will have to find a way to guide the cables on the outside. Another disadvantage is that the Aries Tripod doesn't have any good points to fix all the boxes:

• The control box of the mount
• The keypad
• The MGBox
• The NUC computre
• The Anderson Powerpole
• The DC/DC converter

The cntrol box and keypad hang loosely from the azimuth lock screws on the mount:

For now, I put all the other boxes on the "tarp" that the Aries tripod has:

Not pretty, but OK for now...

The bigger problem were the cables from the mount: the USB cable, the 12V power cable and the power cable for the FLI camera. I want to maintain what I had before: that I can disconnect them easily, remove the scope and reconnect them.

The 10Micron saddle has the lock screws for the dovetail on the left side of the scope - unlike the AP or Bisque saddles that have them on the right side. So, I move the cables over to the right side so that they don't get in the way of mounting and unmounting the scope. I sheathed them all the way down. Then I attached non-fixed cable rings on the saddle plate and on the  mount itself. I routed the cables through it and added velcro at the ends so that the cables create a large loop to have enough room to move the mount around. Plus because the cables are not fixed they can be pulled through if needed.

Not quite as nice as through-the-mount-cabling, but almost as good.

The 10Micron mount runs on 24V but came with a 12V-24V converter. I replaced the cigarette light plug with Anderson poles and plugged it into the powerpole distributor.

One final thing I did was to move my DC/DC converter in front of all equipment (not just the FLI camera). I measured the Ampere of both and there wasn't any real difference. Now, the whole mount is powered with smooth 12V power - even from a battery. I could now actually power the FLI camera through the powerpole distributer on the scope and have only two cables running down. But I'll do that later - once I am convinced that this works really well.