Who is this mount for?
To do astrophotography seriously you need a seriously big telescope. And to carry a big telescope you need a big mount. Up until now that meant splashing out about five thousand pounds but Skywatcher’s new CQ350 astrophotography mount claims to allow you to image with a massive and I mean MASSIVE 35kg telescope for just £2.5k. Wow. A potential game changer. But can it really do it?
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(You won’t find a better price)
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(You won’t find a better price)
My affiliate link
(You won’t find a better price)
My affiliate link
(You won’t find a better price)
In this review I test the CQ350 mount with a Celestron C14 HD Edge. It’s a massive scope. Having lugged the C14 around for a couple of months I can’t imagine anyone wishing to use anything bigger. I’ve just weighed the C14 on the bathroom scales and I can report its nearly 25kg and with camera gear we’re hitting 27kg (60lbs). Close enough to 35kg (77lbs) to be a good test and anyway goodness knows what scope you’d need to hit 35kg. It would be a monster.
Quick Verdict
Sky-Watcher’s CQ350 PRO mount is great for astrophotography. It’s not perfect but it is great. It can guide a 27kg load with an accuracy better than 0.7 arcseconds even on targets close to the horizon. On targets higher in the sky the accuracy increases up to about 0.5 arcseconds or more. It’s easy to use. It’s well designed. Its excellent value for money. All in all Sky Watcher’s dominance of the budget mount market is spilling over into mounts for serious scopes too.
PROS
- Built for astrophotography
- Expect guiding accuracy of 0.8 – 0.4 arcseconds rms without PEC.
- Its ‘car’ portable (no mean feat for such a heavy duty mount).
- Excellent value
Cons
- The USB hub didn’t work for me (but please see the update).
- Takes a while to run in.
Unboxing
The mount head itself only weighs 15kg. 10kg lighter than the sky-watcher eq8. This makes the CQ350 mount an option for packing up in your car and taking to a dark site. And for me that is a big deal. I live in London so to get the best out of a mount I need it to be ‘car’ portable… and this heavy duty mount is! The two counterweights are 10kg each and the tripod is 15kg – the same as the mount head. You can buy this mount with or without the tripod. On its own the tripod costs about £500.
If you need to carry this lot any distance then you’ll know about it but critically nothing is so heavy that the prospect of carrying it fills me with dread and prevents me from actually setting up. I think the size and weight of this heavy duty set up is most impressive. If this mount works Sky Watcher are surely onto a winner.
The mount doesn’t come with a polar scope. But that’s fine for me because I use Sharpcap’s astrophotography software to get accurate polar alignment. You can buy an £89 polar scope if you wish.
The syncscan handset in included but in this test I will be controlling the mount with a computer through an eqmod cable.
The power cable screws into the mount’s GX12-2 pin female power socket for a secure fit – this is great. I love power cables that lock in. At the other end the power cable fits into a car cigarette plug socket. Cigarette plug power sockets are absolutely useless. They are so likely to briefly cut the power connection and ruin your astro session that in my opinion they should be banned. Luckily clever old Andrew ( a trained electrician) had already bought a £22 lynx Astro silicon power cable 2.1mm DC Socket to GX12-2 DC Jack which not allows you to hook the mount into a normal 2.1mm dc power jack it also won’t go brittle and snap in the cold. I used a 13.8v regulated PSU for this test.
The saddle can hold vixen or losmandy dovetails and its got nice big tightening knobs which are critical when you use bigger scopes. Well done sky watcher.
The Ra and Dec Clutches are in a really nice position on the side of the mount. Gone are the days of awkwardly contorting your hand round the counterweight bar to reach them. Unfortunately the locking mechanism took a bit of getting used to. I struggled to lock the clutches which is a bit scary when you have a massive scope like the C14 mounted. It turns out you need to wiggle the scope a bit before the locking mechanism can be turned and locked. I’m guessing the reason is something along the lines of the clutch doesn’t like locking when the teeth of the ra/dec gear aren’t aligned. This means that it’s not possible to point the scope manually in exactly the direction you want as you will always need to wiggle the scope a little bit before the clutch can be locked. This isn’t a big deal and overall I like the clutches.
Setting Up
Setting up was straightforward until I discovered that the 2x10kg counter weights weren’t enough to hold the 27kg of telescope and camera gear. An extra 10kg counterweight costs about £100 so I decided to botch and old 5kg counterweight onto the end of the shaft. And that seemed to work ok.
Annoyingly the mounts very useful power sockets which feed power from the mount’s aux power source to your various astro devices is made up of 3×2.1mm female jacks. So to plug into them your gear you need a cable with a male jack at both ends. I don’t have such a cable so I couldn’t check the mount’s power outputs.
GOOD NEWS: when I connected my camera (qhy269m), my filterwheel, the off axis guider and the mount (via the eqmod cable) into the mounts internal USB hub and fed a 5m active repeater usb 3 cable from the roof through to my the office computer everything loaded up in my astrophotography software (NINA) first time. This is brilliant. Either I’m getting better at this or mounts are getting less finikity!
BAD NEWS (see usb hub update for more on this): When I took a test image with the lens cap on the image came out looking segmented (see pic).
Something had gone horribly wrong with the way the data is coming off the camera and going into my computer. I asked some of the meganerds on the astrobiscuit discord server and got feedback that the reason can be a poor quality usb hub. When I plugged all my gear into my own £15 usb3 hub which I bought on amazon using all the same cables as before the images from the camera were back to normal. One has to imagine I was doing something wrong because it’s hard to believe Sky-Watcher would have made this big a mess of the usb hub. Maybe I need to power it differently. Maybe some helpful person will comment below and tell me the fix but at this moment I think the CQ350’s internal usb hub is astonishingly BAD!
USB HUB UPDATE
I’ve just been speaking to a very clever meganerd from across the pond and he says I should have been powering my 5m usb 3 repeater cable. Turns out all companies making internal usb hubs for their mounts face a particular problem. To make the usb cable link from the saddle down through the head of the mount calls for a number of connections. Every time the signal passes through a usb connection it loses strength. So the internal usb hubs lose as much signal as an unpowered 6ft usb cable. This isn’t problem for usb2 but for usb3 the additional connections make the signal too weak to then pass along my 5m long usb3 cable to my computer. Hence the need to power my usb3 repeater cable. If I’d have done that the mount’s hub should have worked. The reason my simple £15 usb3 hub from amazon worked was because it isn’t hampered by the power draining connections of the internal hub. I hope that makes sense. FYI I’m guessing all usb3 internal mount hubs will face a similar problem.
Polar aligning
I polar aligned by temporarily piggybacking a small guide scope onto the C14 and using the sharpcap software’s polar alignment routine. The mounts azimuth and altitude adjustment knobs are fantastic. The heavy load rotated smoothly on the tripod’s special slippy plastic pads that the mount head sits on. And the large altitude adjustment knob was the best I’ve ever used. When polar alignment was close I started tightening bolts for locking the mount head into place and then ran the polar alignment routine again. Everything worked as it should. Polar alignment took 10 minutes. Well done skywatcher.
First Light
Ultimately to judge a mount for astrophotography you need to find out how little it wobbles when guiding. Now everyone loves to show off about how good their guiding is. They love to show you their phd2 guiding graph and tell you that their mount is wobbling by less than 0.00000000000001 arc seconds. If you want to show of too simply point your telescope within 30 degrees of Polaris and your guiding will be excellent. The real test of guiding is when you’re pointing as far away from Polaris as possible and you can’t get much further away than Orion. This is where the earth’s rotation causes the stars to move at their fastest and it is the region of space where I will be testing how much this mount wobbles whilst guiding. The guiding I get in this region of space will be the worst that this mount will deliver. So if you buy this mount you can expect to get better guiding that this when you shoot galaxies or nebula that are higher in the sky.
The first test is phd2’s calibration routine. Sometimes excessive backlash can cause PHD2 calibration to fail. This is something that happens with cheap mounts. I’m happy to report that the backlash on this mount seems fairly small. But when I started guiding the mount was all over the place. After about 5 minutes the mount was wobbling with an rms of 1.7arcseconds which is bad. The wind speed was 6-7mph and this may have been enough to cause the mount to wobble. By the end of the first night the guiding was down to 1.1arc seconds rms which is still disappointing.
Second light
A few days later I took the mount and the C14 to a dark site on the South Downs near Bignor Hill. The wind was a bit lighter about 5 mph. This time she guided much better. Round about 0.8 arcs on the Horse Head nebula (this nebula is near the left hand star in Orion’s belt). I would consider this to be good guiding for a mount in this price range. Later in the night I aimed at a much higher target, the galaxy M106. Guiding was now down to 0.5 arc seconds of wobble (rms). Wow! As I said before targets nearer Polaris are much easier for astrophotography mounts but still this was good. According to my mount specialist mate Dave from Darkframe optics it takes time for mounts to bed themselves in and I think we are seeing exactly that in these results. First light was poor but second light was much better. I wonder how good it will get…
Third light
The last time I took the mount out I was on my roof once again. It was a calm night, I aimed the C14 at the horse head and shot 6x 20minute long exposures using my new 3nm bandwidth optolong Ha filter. Each shot was fine. My guiding averaged 0.7arc seconds rm. The mount had gotten even better.
Conclusion
I am now happy to declare that this mount is very good. The competition would be the iOptron’s CEM70 which is a tiddly bit more expensive, has less load capacity (although at 31kg its enough) and only 9.5kg of counter weight. I don’t know if the CEM70’s usb hub needs a powered usb3 repeater cable but if it doesn’t then that is a bonus. But the big thing for me is guiding. All a mount has to do is counteract the rotation of the earth. Everything else is just dressing. I’ve not seen the CEM70’s guiding graph whilst carrying a decently heavy load. I know that the CQ350 can deliver at least 0.7 arcsecond rms error carrying a 27kg load whilst shooting a low target like the Horse Head. It will of course perform better still with a lighter load and much better on targets that aren’t so low on the horizon. I expect the mount will improve even more and as it gets run in which is why if I had the money to buy a CQ350 I would. Its exactly the mount I need for the bigger telescopes that I would like to start using. So congratulations Sky-Watcher you’ve done a good job. This Segues nicely into mentioning my affiliate links. If you are thinking of buying one please, please, please use one of my affiliate links😁 the next astrobiscuit video depends on it! Thanking you kindly. And thx Andrew for lending me the mount. You’ve got a goodun!
See Also…
My new widefield travel rig
Naked Astrophotography
Best Value Telescope for Astrophotography
32 responses to “The Sky-Watcher CQ350 Mount Review”
This looks very tempting. A mount is this years big upgrade after getting a nice 90mm triplet last year. My plan for pier is to piggyback or side-by-side the triplet with a 9.25 edge so something like this would be ideal. Really hope someone comments with the USB issue as this might be enough to push me to the CEM70.
Yeh the hub thing is annoying but it was so easy to solve the problem with a £15 usb 3 hub from amazon that I didn’t bother spending that much time trying to fix it. Be interesting to see if others have had similar problems or whether it was just user error!
Think I really want one now after reading through a couple of times. The CEM70 looks nice but you kinda know what your getting with a SW and FLO are a 30min cycle ride away for me. Luckily I did plan for the future when I built my 1.2t garden pier.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/fWMwkCK481GAjneB8😃🤣that should do it
I agree with you about other mount makers. I’ve had problems with Losmandy, iOptron and Celestron mounts in the past. The Sky-watcher mounts have always been good. My eqm-35 is really VERY good. So much better than any of the other smaller mounts I’ve used.If I didn’t already have a Losmandy G11 class mount I’d be looking at this a lot more than I already am. When I first saw it, it really caught my attention. Ive been hungry for details on it and other reviews were light on critical details such as the guiding performance. Are you done with your evaluation or is there more to come?
~Cheers
Am I done… Well am pretty much done. I’ll update with news of the hub. I’m confident I’d be able to show a phd graph of the mount hitting 0.4 arcseconds in the future (bc I’m gonna image M106 which is high in the sky) but I would prefer not to do that as when I started out I bought mounts on the back of amazing phd graphs and I didn’t realise how important which bit of the sky the mount was pointing at. So when I shot low targets like orion I was disappointed. Its a good mount. Not really much more to say about it. FYI I really didn’t like my GM8. I hope your G11 is much better.
Hi Anthony. A bit off topic but I’ve just purchased the CQ350 mount and tripod – (I’m a complete newbie to astrophotography and wanted to get a decent mount after being completely frustrated with my old Celestron Nextstar 8SE with AZ goto mount)) and am very interested in your garden pier mount. Would the mount you built fit the CQ350, any advice how I would go about building one for myself?
hey mate, just to say I’ve had some feedback on the USB hub issue: https://astrobiscuit.com/2023/02/07/cq350-mount-review/#update
I like the G11. It seems very robust. Has a decent payload. Tracks well. Priced competitively when paired with the heavy duty folding tripod. I think the main advantage is that it’s upgradeable should I want more payload. I don’t know what controller (gemini I or II) you were using and at what firmware revision, but II with Rev 5 is solid for me. I think about my only complaint would be that the motors are pretty loud when slewing.
oh good I’m glad it works well. My complaint with the GM8 was that its guiding was poor. Much worse that the blogs on cloudy nights made out at the time. It was quite an old mount. Maybe from 2010 something like that. I felt it was an observers mount not an astrophotography mount.
I bought the CQ350 couple months ago for long heavy refractor, Stellarview 152, bout 35 lbs with a worse MOI than your heavier 14. I have had very similar numbers with guiding, continues to improve, and usb 3 doesn’t work even with the powered cable they provide. The power distribution does work tho. I use a pegasus usb hub and have one usb hanging off the back to comuter. Otherwise, very good design, lighter than EQ6rpro and works great down to 11degF in Colorado without a wimper. Seems to be good grease for cold weather.
good to know thx frank
I bought this mount couple of months ago it’s really nice. It guided just as good if not better than my mates paramount that cost 3 times more. Never been so please with an Astro gear purchase.
great to hear.
I’m thinking of buying the cq350 to replace my meade lx 850, would the cq 350 be capable of handling my meade 14″sct which weighs about 70lbs plus the camera and autofocuser.
well thants very similar to what I had. You will need 3x10kg counterweights. So you’d need to buy an extra one.
I like the look of this mount however,,My main concern is the position of the hub and power connections, seems a strange place to put them up at the front of the saddle, tangles and snags look likely, any thoughts??
well as you see i didn’t use the usb hub in the end. I just stuck with my own mini usb3 hub. I guess having the hub at the front is better for newts than it is for refractors but the benefits are marginal. the sockets are only about 20cm from where they would be if they were positioned at the back.
Nice Review, I can get you some comparative guiding data from my CEM70G with an Altair 10 inch 250 RC. But real world guiding from PHD is about 1.25″ – 1.50″ depending on target and weather etc… ping me a message on your discord server (AstroChris#4620). Also the CEM70G USB hub is a bit flakey when you start to run a few devices through it, it struggles with an ASI294MM pro and filterwheel. ClearSkies!!
Hey Chris, I think you offering to do this kind of stuff is really useful and helps the community no end. I’ll ping you now.
I got this mount and mines seems to have gone the other way and bed itself out. 1st light I was getting 0.4 last couple of nights it’s been jumping up to around 1.5. Bit dissapointed with the mount now. My last image looked better on my old neq6.
that is odd, do you thinj something could have have gone awry elsewhere…
Can confirm the USB 3 ports on my CEM120 were equally flakey, even with my PC connected to the pier below the scope. USB hubs are just trouble, avoid at all costs.
interesting thx. I might need to change what it says in the comments.
i dunno.. my eq6r guides at 0.2 rms at a dark site (bortle 4 is deakrsite for me) and around 0.4-6 at home, considering this is well over 1k more when you buy a tripod or pier and its only 2kg less then the eq6r head, unless you need to use the weight limit it can achieve its not that good?
What angle were the targets you were guiding? I was tracking objects on the Celestial equator. Its far harder to track in this area than at higher elevations so my results represent the worst case scenario. I confident that this tracks as well as an eq6-r. BTW going to a dark site shouldn’t make any difference to your guiding. Unless the seeing is better.
do a Youtube video please about your final impressions
ok
Hi Astrobiscuit,
I’m considering the CQ350 mount for my old C14. Do you have a video of this combination while slewing and going to objects? I would love to see it to get convinced after your review. Also which is the counterweight shaft diameter?. I would have to use an additional counterweigh from my old G11 losmandy mount. I dont know if it would fit.
Cheers
Hi, Yes I will be posting a video review at some point but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait as I have a number of other videos to make that are more urgent. FYI the mount handles the C14 fine although you will need about 25-30kg of counterweights. The mount is supplied with 20kg. I don’t know if the losmandy weights fit. The weights for the cq350 are the same as the ones used by the eq8.
Andrew is a very kind and very brave guy lending Astrobiscuit his mount haha! Has he seen your videos?
Can’t wait for the review video and am just about to become a patron. I NEED MORE BISCUIT CONTENT!!!
nice article thanks
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