The mount

From Scope F70076

The tripod is sturdy when the legs are kept short, and almost no wobbling from the tripod is noticeable then. The telescope can be nicely used that way, sitting near it. Whenever the legs would be made longer, the wobbling caused by the tripod would be noticeable -- that wobbling is especially nasty in that it ends only in 15 seconds or so after touching the telescope, therefore making the legs longer should be avoided whenever possible.

The telescope has a fork mount, all the cheapest telescopes have such mount -- likely it is more expensive to make any other joint, so there is no choice anyway what concerns the mount. Such mount causes wobbling after moving the scope or focusing, but this wobbling ends in one second and the telescope would be completely stable after that. This time is short enough so that it enables the normal use of the telescope, a slight wobbling while moving or focusing is not that important, important is that you can observe objects while they are completely still. The wobbling is caused by twisting the base of the fork and cannot be avoided anyhow, for no wobbling a very massive or wooden fork would be necessary.

The movements of the telescope are smooth, and it can be moved very exactly. The fine adjustment rod is completely unnecessary and causes uneven altitude movement even when the tightening screw is completely open, so I use the telescope without that rod. The azimuth movements are smooth also, but I first had to oil the azimuth joint.

Concerning the mount, there was a warning on the box not to tighten the srews too much. Likely, at least the screws screwed into the aluminium would become loose when screwed in too much, and would then fall out. Therefore, when the screws are well tightened, there is no need to touch them any more and then they would stay permanently in.

One more thing to say about the mounts: you may regret that the mount is not equatorial, but it is said that the cheap equatorial mounts are by far not precise enough to use them to position the telescope to a star, and such mounts are mostly even more unstable, only causing an additional wobbling, thus it is not good to buy a cheap telescope with an equatorial mount.

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