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Old 18-06-2017, 09:02 PM
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OzEclipse (Joe Cali)
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Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Young Hilltops LGA, Australia
Posts: 1,185
Quote:
I'd agree with Joe's comments here, but you might want to look what you'll do with the tracker after the massive two and a half minutes use you might get during a total solar eclipse.
Likewise I agree with Pete. You need to think about what you want to do, in addition to the eclipse. Weight is not such an issue. All air tickets to the USA that I've seen, come with 46kg luggage allocation. You can bring an HEQ5, iOptron iEQ45 etc if you want.

I have two EQ trackers for travel.

One is a home built very lightweight rig that I machined/constructed 17 yrs ago before the current crop of trackers were release. It has milled slots where the dec attaches to the RA so that the load can be balanced without counterweights. Losmandy, SW etc copied my concept years later .

The entire rig tripod, EQ head, wedge, drive control and power supply weighs 4.5 kg all up. The declination is a strut design and disassembles to pack to flat plates. The worm drive is a 50mm straight spur gear driven by a helical cut worm. The worm was something I salvaged from a scrapyard purchase. Backlash and PE never measured but I am pretty sure both are terrible. I use this just for the eclipse. It will hold an ED80 or WO72mm APO however being so light, it can tip. At site, I attach water bottles to the legs to stabilize the mount. See attached photo. I removed the water bottles for the photo .

The other one is a Losmandy Starlapse purchased 2nd hand from another IIS member 3 yrs ago. I use the same home made 400g tripod, wedge, power supply just swap the EQ heads and drive control - 7.5kg all up.

I take the Losmandy with me when I want an astrophotography tracking mount as well as an eclipse mount. I use my custom lightweight mount when carry weight/volume are an issue and if I don't intend to do any astrophotography.

Joe
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