![]() ![]() I found it very convenient and, to be honest rather fun, to swap between the narrower field of view of the larger instrument and the wider field of view of the smaller instrument so easily and I can see that dual telescope observing could become rather addictive! Conclusion ![]() This provided a very secure mounting and the fine adjustment of the altitude setting on the saddle assembly made it fairly easy to align the two telescopes with one another in the vertical axis. Having tried the mount with a single telescope counterbalanced horizontally with one of the supplied weights, I then mounted a second, shorter focal length telescope, to the secondary dovetail saddle. However, SkyWatcher are aware of this anomaly and are working on a solution that will be addressed in a future firmware upgrade. Most objects appeared comfortably within the 2° field of view of my 17mm Hyperion eyepiece and 618mm focal length refractor but GoTo accuracy was not as good as it had been when using the mount in Equatorial mode. With alignment completed successfully, I set off on a journey of discovery to locate a wide range of objects in various locations in the night sky. A final press of the ‘Enter’ key confirms the mount’s alignment. Once the slew has been completed, you centre the star in the finderscope and then fine tune the pointing by centring it in the eyepiece of the main telescope. ![]() The system will ask you to select a second alignment star from the star list which will set the mount slewing to the new location using the position of the confirmed first alignment star as its known start point. Finally, you centre the star through the eyepiece of the main telescope and press ‘Enter’ again. For the first part of the alignment, using the finderscope, you can also choose to undo the mount’s clutches and manually push the telescope until it is pointing at the first star. Choose a bright star in the night sky that you can readily identify and scroll through the list of alignment stars to find it, select it and then manually slew the mount using the direction keys on the handcontroller until the star is centred in the telescope’s finderscope and press the ‘Enter’ key. Two star alignment is quick and straightforward. After this has been completed, you can choose celestial objects from the extensive 42,000 object database to slew to. This stepped movement makes them unsuitable for long exposure imaging but they are fine for observational use where their more intuitive pointing makes them easier to use than an Equatorial mount.Īlthough polar alignment is not required, the mount does need to be mapped to the night sky and this is achieved by carrying out a simple 2 star alignment process. Because of this movement, they can be set up in any position and don’t have to be polar aligned so set-up time is reduced. In this final part of the review I’ll be looking at the mount from an observer’s point of view rather than an imaging one with the mount set up in Altazimuth mode.Īltazimuth mounts track objects as they move across the sky, using two axes in discrete horizontal and vertical steps, unlike an Equatorial mount which tracks objects in an arc using the movement of a single axis. This initial review was followed by a closer look at the mount when set up in Equatorial mode. In part 1 of this long-term review I looked at the constructional features of the new mount with some general comparisons against the original NEQ6.
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