The Losmandy Titan is a German equatorial mount (GEM) with a 100lb rated payload capacity. I’ve owned my Titan since just before Christmas 2004.
The Titan is a big beast, tipping the scales at 75lbs for the equatorial head (broken into two parts for slightly easier portability). It comes with the Gemini Astronomical Positioning System, which provides goto capability as well as an extensive object library, PEC, mount modelling and a raft of other features (see René Goerlich’s site for more information). I currently have the Gemini-2 system on the mount (replacing the previous Gemini 1 system).
Using the Titan
There are lots of tips relating to using the Titan, but some excellent links are as follows:
- The Titan Tips pages – a whole load of useful info here about Titan GEMs!
- The Yahoo Titan Users’ Group
- The Yahoo Gemini Users’ Group
A permanent mount
The mount is located in my observatory in my back garden – this is a second (third?) hand Home Dome 10 by Technical Innovations.
My previous “observatory” lived in the (tiny) back garden of my old flat – simply a pier bolted onto 3 foot of concrete which was covered and locked up in a small 3 foot square roll away shed. It worked well, though, because of an extended house move, maybe didn’t get as much use as I would have liked.
The Titan currently carries a double truss, 350mm f4.53 Newtonian telescope. This was home built (using a combination of off-the-shelf and custom parts) and reused the optics from the SPX350. Details about the Newtonian build to follow!
Losmandy Titan by Graeme Coates is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.