I live in a 4-level town house about 20 miles west of Washington DC, USA and usually operate the scope from my second level deck.  The light pollution varies from moderate to severe, but I have reasonably good skies as long as the object is 20-30 degrees above the local horizon. 

I have mounted the  Meade Equatorial wedge permanently to my deck and carry the 8" in and out for imaging sessions.  The cables run through a nearby window.  Total cable length is only about 20 feet. 

My most significant imaging problems are the fact that the deck is elevated and not vibration proof and that neighboring townhouses often produce strong sources of light that enter the scope unexpectedly.  During the winter, the heat from the neighboring townhouses also impedes seeing and reduce the clarity of my planetary images taken at high focal ratios. 

I've also included some additional pages that show construction detail for the equatorial mount and how I attach the Starlight Express CCD.

 I  chose this particular image, because of all of the clouds I've experienced during the spring of  2000.

The single bolt hold the scope in place and you can move it slightly to align the remaining two mounting holes.

You then insert two addition bolts to finalize the scope position and firmly hold it in place. 

You need to be careful when inserting these two bolts.  The scope base is made from cast aluminum and the bolts are steel.  It is very easy to cross thread the two bolts.  The basic rule is "DON'T FORCE THE BOLTS!"

When the LX 200 powers up, the software assumes the scope is in this position.  If you are careful when setting the zero-zero position, if the scope clock is set correctly and if the wedge is aligned, the scope GOTO can find a star, at least in the finder, when you power up without any additional alignment. 

My power up errors are usually about one degree. 

These additions helped stiffen the mount considerably, but I still have some flexure in the leveling platform.  Fortunately the STAR 2000 is more than up to the task of correcting any remaining alignment errors.  The primary affect on the flexure now is to make the GOTO's less accurate.  I get around this problem by going first to a bright star near the object I want to image.  I can then realign the scope on this star using the finder before going to the deep sky object.

After getting the object positioned on the CCD where I want it, I normally take a 2 min trial exposure.  This lets me make certain that the STAR 2000 will guide the scope correctly.  Once that trial exposure is a success, I'll go for either 5, 10 or 20 minute exposures.

I normally process them "on the fly" to help judge when I have enough exposure time.  I use a second computer for this "on the fly" processing.  This is easily accomplished because I have the Ethernet local area network in my townhouse.