Making and modifying telescope mounts

Backyard Voyager

Equatorial, alttitude-azimuth and dobsonian telescope mounts

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Making an Equatorial Platform by Reiner Vogel

Dobsons are alt-azimuthal telescopes, as everybody knows. This may be a disadvantage if you want to observe planets at say 400x. It does work, of course, but it requires some practice and smooth operation of the telescope mount. Nevertheless, it would be nice, if Jupiter would just stay in the middle of your field of view.

There is a relatively simple method to realize an equatorial mount for Dobsonians, particularly if you are interested in visual use only. More..........

CG5 Hardwood Tripod By Pawel Lancucki

I use CG-5 mount from Celestron for about one year. After fixing initial problems with poor mechanical performance due to stiff grease and bad surfaces finish, the mount proved quite useful with a range of telescopes, including 90mm f/11 achromatic refractor, 170mm f/7 Newtonian and 100mm f/10 Maksutov.

However, there was still a number of things which remained annoying with the mount, the worst being the poor aluminium tripod, which – while adequate for my small Mak, did not support properly the heavier Newtonian. More.........

A Home Made Tripod For The CG-5 Mount by Jim Mueller

After using an 8" Dob for two years, I decided to ease my way into astrophotography with a Celestron C8. I chose the G-8 model because it's FastStar compatible and comes with an German equatorial mount, the CG-5. The nice thing about this versatile mount is that it can be used with other tube assemblies. Several other amateurs have re-built this mount and made it usable for astrophotography, as well. This quickly became my plan. More...

Portable Mount by Mac & Maggie McAvoy

This is a simple variation of the German Equatorial Mount. It uses galvanized pipe fittings, namely a T-fitting, two floor flanges, two close nipples, and a length of pipe for the counterweight. It's important to understand that most pipe and fittings are of the National Pipe Tapered variety. Meaning, the nipples will thread in only so far before they bind. I searched high and low for National Pipe Straight fittings but had no luck. I'm sure you could find them on the web but I would think the shipping would be very expensive. Also, I used Poplar for my mount. More...

Roller Bearings for your Dobsonian Telescope by Stefan Keller-Tuberg

During the process of planning the construction of my Dobsonian telescope, I looked around for information published by others describing how to motorise a telescope. In all the categories, there were several basic approaches but I didn't really want to try any of these on my own motorised telescope. In the end, I thought long and hard and came up with the approach shown on this page. It's straightforward and uses roller skate wheels in the rocker box and roller blade wheels on the ground board. More....