Telescope Buying Guide: Equatorial Mounts

Video Transcript

"Another mount commonly used in astronomy is the equatorial mount. The equatorial has one axis tilted toward the celestial pole, to allow you to track with the Earth's rotation. Now there are a couple different ways you can get an equatorial mount. A basic model like this one right here has slow motion controls to help you compensate for the Earth's rotation by simply turning the knobs, and it'll rotate both axes for you. Another common accessory here is a motor drive. Once you lock your telescope on the object you want to view, you click on your motor drive, and the telescope and the mount will track automatically for you. So the advantage of an equatorial mount is to be able to track on both axes with slow motion at the same time. What I would not recommend the equatorial mount for is daytime viewing, as they can be a little bit frustrating to use. As I'm using it for astronomy, very nice very simple control across the night sky. But if I want to stop and look out the window, I have one clutch I need to loosen over here, I have another clutch that I need to loosen over here, to get the scope to where I want to be. I lock down the clutches again, and then I look out the window with the slow motion controls, but ideally an altazimuth mount is what I would recommend for you if you're going to do a variety of terrestrial and astronomy viewing. The next step up for an equatorial mount is what they call a GoTo mount. This has motor drives in both axes, and isn't really critical unless you're going to expand the hobby into astral photography. A GoTo mount, which I'll touch on a little bit later, has a hand controller such as this guy right here, and once properly aligned with two or three stars, with a touch of a button, will take you anywhere in the universe that you want to view."