Celestron to discontinue distributing the Losmandy G-11 Mount

On 16 June 1992 Company Seven received the first of our Celestron C-11 telescopes on the Losmandy HGM Model G-11 mount, and we published our favorable review of the CG-11 telescope. The CG-11 became the most successful mid aperture Schmidt Cassegrain telescope ever sold by Company Seven.

On 19 May 1998 it was formally announced that Celestron International company will discontinue the sales of the Losmandy Model "G-11" German equatorial mount. Celestron had worked with the well regarded precision machine shop Hollywood General Machining to refine and produce what became known as the G-11 mount for distribution exclusively by Celestron. The G-11 became the versatile platform of choice for the very successful and innovative Celestron CG-11 11" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, and later for the Celestron CG-14 14" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope.

The announcement came as somewhat of a surprise - well sort of. This concept had become so popular here that we found the backlog of orders with the Celestron company could exceed four months, although it averaged maybe two months. The delay had to do with the shortage of mounts coming from Losmandy; Celestron rarely seemed to run short of C-11 or C-14 optical tube assemblies - this may have been due to either Celestron not ordering enough mounts, or that Losmandy could not make enough.

The G-11 mount had also became the platform for Celestron to sell the C-14 telescopes. The relatively primitive and cumbersome fork mount for the C-14 was discontinued. This left Celestron with C-14 OTA manufacturing capacity and with not enough mounts to fill the order. Furthermore, the G-11 really lacked the rigidity in any kind of wind prone site to support the massive C-14 OTA for long term imaging. The G-11 mount was not originally designed to manage the C-14 with wind loads even though the bearings and