Wednesday, July 5, 2006

An Innovative New Telescope Mount Design

The biggest expense and weight for most telescopes is the mount--not the optical tube. Building an equatorial mount (one that tracks objects across the sky as the Earth rotates) that is sufficiently rigid to hold a telescope--and not vibrate or shake--is a daunting task. There are a variety of designs: the German equatorial mount (here's a beautiful example at Parallax Instruments); the fork mount (here's a Meade fork mounted Schmidt-Cassegrain); the yoke mount (in this case, the Mount Wilson 100 inch reflector).

Here's a description of a new design for an equatorial mount that looks to be very simple, lightweight, and probably quite rigid. I'm getting tempted for Big Bertha...

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