Heavy Duty Tripod Choice

[Travesso]

Hey guys,

Looking for a heavy duty tripod for my AOE 20x80mm triplets and I'm tossing up between a Velbon CX686 for $165 from Bintel or a Saxon HVT10 for "less than $179" from AOE. Any ideas or other suggestions? My $30 aluminium/plastic digicam tripod is pretty bloody ordinary at holding up about 3.5kg of bino :D

Cheers,

Travis

[Dennis]

Hi Travis

Make a list of your specific requirements to help you decide. A typical list might look something like this:


Transportable – weight, stowed dimensions, max height, etc
Easy to set up – how easy is it to spread the legs, lock them, adjust them?
Stable – does it wobble or is it solid?
Ease of adjustments – is it easy to adjust the height, leg spread, individual legs for sloping sites, etc?
Tripod head – what fitting is required, is the attachment method rigid and strong?
Versatility – can it be used for more than one purpose; spotting ‘scope, camera, bino’s, etc?
How easy is it to operate in the dark?
Do you need interchangeable heads - if so, how do they fit on the tripod?
Can any bits fall off if you undo something too far? Looking for dropped nuts and bolts in a grass paddock at night is challenging.

Answers to these may help narrow down your choices. I haven’t included budget in the list, as my experience has been that to obtain any astro equipment that you will use frequently, is a pleasure to use, reliable, etc often means expensive, but at least you only buy it once.

In the past I have purchased light and medium weight tripods and soon out grew them, or found them to be very frustrating to use due to wobbles, complexity in set up, etc. Then I had to but the "correct" item, thus "wasting" the original outlay.

Cheers, good luck and I hope I haven’t spooked you!

Dennis

[mercedes_sl1970]

Travis

Just a thought - something else to consider is whether you might need an additional "attachment" between the tripod and the binoculars and hence need even greater weight carrying capacity. For example, a parallellogram mount or swing arm arrangement. One of the issues for a tripod alone is that, once you start moving up higher in the sky and especially at zenith, you do have to contort your head and neck to get under the eyepieces.

Good luck

Andrew

[janoskiss]

As far as stability goes the AOE tripod is fine for those binos. (donno about the other one) It's also got a head that's easy to orient/point. As far as comfort at altitudes 40 deg and higher, I agree with Andrew that you really need something other than a photography style tripod. That's the main issue with big straight-through binos for astronomy.