MICHAEL W. DEAN

My shot of Pinwheel Galaxy, (Messier 101) from the other night
21 million light-years from Earth. 2 hour and 8 min of shooting.  1000 mm at f/4.

Also, un-cropped image with overlay of what’s what (PGC ones are more-distant galaxies.) and a photo of the scope on my mount. It barely fits in the AstroHut, lol. (click images to see larger)

SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD

(Text below all photos)

I’m selling a Fastar-compatible Celestron EdgeHD 8″, used with accessories. This scope is great for astrophotography or visual astronomy. Focal length is 2032 mm, or if you add the .7x reducer that Celestron makes, focal length then is 1470 mm.

Leave a comment below using your real email and I’ll get back to you promptly. (Comment will be held for moderation if you haven’t posted before, but I’ll still see it. Your email will not be public.)

1200 dollars with shipping within USA. Outside USA, you pay shipping over 100 dollars US. Will ship within two days of payment via PayPal.

I bought it on Cloudy Nights, enjoyed it, but now want a bigger scope.

It’s a little scratched on the outside, and has a little bit of tape gunk on the outside, but works. No cracks or scratches in optics. Is as shown in these many photos, everything shown here comes with it except the table its all sitting on.

Here are two photos I took with it. (You may do better with it, I’ve only been doing astro since August 2022. Both of these used the .7x reducer that Celestron).

4 hour integration of Crescent Nebula:
https://www.astrobin.com/982lw6/

A few quick pix of the Moon:
https://www.astrobin.com/5eo7is/
https://www.astrobin.com/zlnvcd/

INCLUDED:
Visual back, #astrophotography back, visual 45 degree adapter, Celestron visual 40 mm Plosll eyepiece, visual finder scope and mounting. Includes correct Bob’s Knobs.

Astromania 1.25″ Astrophotography Flip Mirror – The flip Mirror for Precise Focusing (paid 107 dollars). Great with included eyepiece for framing planetary photography when on full native focal length without a reducer.

In-built Celestron dew heater ring (cost 54 dollars), attached on the front as you can see, it works. Can be powered from ASIAIR or other power. Will include (not shown) a cable to power it from an ASIAIR or other power source.

Add a non-powered dew shield tube (not included, but cheap) and start on lowest power, when it’s cold enough to need it, if you live somewhere that gets dew.

I’m also including a Tri-bahtinov mask to help collimation and focusing.

Will be shipped with focus lock-down knobs on back locked down. Just turn them counter-clockwise to unlock, then you can use the focus know to focus, or gently pull the knobs off and attach a remote focuser.

Bookmark this player for 24/7 random feed of all the songs I’ve made in since 2018, 88 albums and counting.

(Zwo / ASI is a company that makes #astrophotography gear)
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ZWO makes great gear for the money but the customer service is horrible. I’m going to divest from using Zwo gear over the next few years, and Zwo has lost thousands of dollars in future purchases from me from this ordeal.

(What Zwo did wrong starts where I put
“THE STORY OF WHAT ZWO DID WRONG STARTS HERE”
everything before that is really just background).

I bought a 5-filter 2-inch Zwo EFW (electronic filter wheel) from a vendor (High Point Scientific, they’re great and they had no part in this story other than that.) I ordered it April 15, 2023.

When I got it, I was still waiting for my AstroHut to be finished being built. I have back problems so didn’t want to set up my gear until it was time to set it up permanently. I didn’t know I could test it with ASI studio, at least test that it turned. I didn’t try to set it up and test it because all Zwo gear I have works, they have a good reputation, and I didn’t think there could be a problem. One thing I learned from this is test everything (from any company) as soon as I get it.

I finally set up and tested the Filter Wheel a few months after I got it, it was DOA.

I set up with my ASIAIR Plus (which works fine), when I sent the command for wheel to move, wheel made a turning sound, grinding sound really, but didn’t turn. It was too late to return via High Point, and too late for Zwo to trade it for a new one, but Zwo said they’d fix it. It was still under warranty, so that makes sense. I was fine with this.

I had to provide videos of it not working, and I did. I didn’t save the first one, but here’s the second one I had to make after they sent it back not working and claimed they’d fixed it:

THE STORY OF WHAT ZWO DID WRONG STARTS HERE:
THE STORY OF WHAT ZWO DID WRONG STARTS HERE:

First, it’s very difficult to get an RMA number from Zwo, or even find a way to do it. If this isn’t intentional it feels intentional. I finally got help from the guy who runs the Zwo Facebook group, after posting the problem there. And once you have it approved to return, you have to repeatedly beg them to give you an address and an RMA number. All of this is systemic for years, not unique to me. Search “Zwo RMA” on CloudyNights or the Facebook ASIAIR group (which is kind of a catch-all group for Zwo gear issues) to see other examples. Simon, the admin of that Facebook group, was the only helpful person in this whole situation. He told me where and how to file an RMA.

It took over a week to get an address and RMA number once approved. There is NO OTHER COMPANY IN THE WORLD THAT DOES THIS. With RMAs, in my experience, even going back to pre-Internet, you get the RMA number and address the minute you’re approved. THIS NEEDS TO BE FIXED.

An additional small issue that finally got fixed near the end of all this was: even though I set up to get notifications when Zwo RMA had a message for me, I did not get notifications. Wasn’t on my end, I don’t have this issue with any other website, I whitelisted the domain, and it finally got fixed after I complained several times. So I had to log in (not as smooth as with many websites) several times a week for 4 months to see what was going on.

The people at Zwo RMA don’t seem to know what’s going on. I had to re-explain the WHOLE story of my issue several times when asked, even though it’s all there under my RMA number in the same thread. I’d guess they either have huge turnover or people working there don’t know what they’re doing. Even so, they could glance at my history in the same thread easily, but asked me questions I’d already answered several times.

I had to re-enter my mailing address several times when asked, even though it’s saved in their system.

After weeks of this, I was able to send my EAF in.

2 months after I started, I got a box back from Zwo, I was excited. I assumed the hassles were over.

EFW arrived back to me with the lid off, and the screws taped to it, I figured they did that to be helpful since you have to take the screws out to put filters in. I put my filters in it, screwed the screws in, and hooked up to ASI Studio to test. Same grinding sound, not working, but when I picked it up I heard shaking. I took it apart and found that they had not fixed it, they had taken the internal wheel off, and still not solved the problem. It’s like the sent it back to me mid-fix.

Again, I made the mistake of trusting Zwo, and assuming they did the right thing. I never should have put my filters in there, those little loose screws for the inner wheel were loose inside the wheel and could have scratched my very expensive filters. Fortunately they did not.

I took my filters out and tried gently screwing in the loose screws that held the wheel in place I tried loose, then a little tighter (but not tight enough to damage). It still did not work. Just that grinding noise.

I contacted ZWO RMA, they told me that they fixed it but the internal screws must have come out in shipping. THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE. If you put the wheel on a paint shaker I don’t think all the screws would come out. And if it were true, it would have worked when I screwed them back in.

I’ve had hundreds of mechanical items shipped to me in my life and never had all screws fall out of something. And they weren’t shipping from China to USA, the repair for USA is in USA, as am I.

I can only conjecture that the person telling me it was fixed either
–lied to me
–was lying for someone else
–was lied to by someone else.

Zwo RMA claimed they put in a new motor, but I don’t see how. Or if they did, I think there was something else they didn’t fix, and I do not believe they put the screws in the wheel and the screws fell off in shipping.

At this point I even tried to contact the CEO of ZWO, through his AstroBin account, but I he never replied, probably never saw it. I’m writing this up hoping he’ll see it. The Zwo RMA system needs to get fixed.

But wait, there’s more……

Zwo made me start A NEW RMA!!! They couldn’t use the same RMA, so I had to start the whole slow process over and jump through the same hoops, be asked twice for my mailing address (which was already in their system), then wait two more months to get a (brand new, working fine) replacement.

I sold the filter wheel at a loss as soon as I got it. I was so sick of Zwo by this time I had already gone with another brand. It was 4 months, almost to the day, since I started the first request.

Zwo needs to fix their customer support to match their good engineering. Zwo acts like they have no competition, but I’ve seen companies do that in the past and they are companies that no longer exist.

Large companies pay lots of money for consultants to analyze their business and see what they’re doing wrong. But even then they probably don’t discover things like this. If Zwo has any plans of being in it for the long run, they should read this post and address it.

Having something not work when brand new is not shocking. It happens once in a while in mass production. But to have to jump through hoops THEN be gaslighted is enough to drive me to never buy from a company again. I’m sort of locked in with using ASIAIR, it doesn’t work with other company’s gear, but I started doing astro with a laptop, and I can go back to it.

This is the kind of post that corporations usually delete, so in case it gets deleted here, and so more people will see it, I’m going to post it on CloudyNights. (I did, here, and on the Zwo forum, here, and both places people are commenting with similar experiences with Zwo. EDIT: after a bunch of people chimed in on the CN thread, agreeing and sharing similar situations they had with Zwo, the thread got locked.  Zwo advertises on CN.)

But if ZWO has any plans of existing far into the future, someone with the power to make changes should read this post.