Single Motor Drive? or new Mount?

[EzyStyles]

Hey guys,

firstly, thanks to the one's who helped me with my EQ5 Mount enquiry :D

Anyway, took some pics of my mount and show it to Roger and Anthony at Bintel. It is an EQ3 and only supports single drive :(

Is there a big difference between single and dual drive when the tele is align to the south pole?

I'm thinking if there isn't a big difference, i get a single drive for it or maybe get a EQ5 mount and dual drive control which will make me broke.

What should i do? :shrug: :shrug:

[Starkler]

Not being experienced with eq mounts this is my take on it.

A single axis drive will track to compensate for the earths rotation. The other axis is for small tweaks to compensate for drift in the declination axis.

In short, you'll only really need the other drive for astrophotography.

[[1ponders]]

As Geoff has said Ezy, the non-motorized axis is for dec adjustments. How much adjustment you need to do will depend on how well your mount is polar aligned. Theoretically if your mount was perfectly polar aligned you wouldn't need to touch it. Unfortunately, due to mount limitations and tolerances and your ability to polar align, that is usually not possible. Even the best telescopes in the world need some adjustment in Declination at some time in their tracking.

Having said all that, if you are manually guiding for photography (which you would be doing as the standard motor drives for your mount don't come "naturally" capable of autoguiding) you can use the manual dec adjustment knob for minor adjustments. It will take some practice though, and your success will be very much dependant on the quality and stability of your mount. Having a dec motor though would make life easier as then you remove the need to touch the mount at all therefore removing one source of potential vibration/movement for the mount.

If you are thinking of getting into astrophotography one of the three things that you cannot really skimp on is the mount. Without a good STABLE mount with regular gear movement (periodic error) you may find it extremely frustrating for anything more than piggyback photography.

That doesn't mean you can't do prime focus and other types of DSO imaging (I'm ignoring planetary here as you should have np with any type of motorized eq3 mount and above), it's just that using the mount you have or even an EQ5 you may have to do quite a bit of initial and ongoing "maintenance" and "tweaking" to bring it up to scratch.

"To be forewarned is to be forearmed" ie. More research so you know the capabilities and limitations of different mounts you can afford.





And we haven't even touched on OTA's yet :P

[asimov]

I have the EQ5 mount (motorized on both axis) & yep, it certainly depends on how well your polar alignment is. High magnification planetary photography is not that easy with a rough polar alignment. Every 30 secs or so I have to make an adjustment to the DEC to keep the image central using the hand controller. It can be done by using the DEC slo-mo hand control but I would be taking the knob off & putting on a flexible cable on it.

For pure visual use having just the driven RA axis is fine. Comes back to how good your polar alignment is then.

[ving]

look at mike's (iceman) pics to see what can be achieve with single axis drive... planets will be ok but DSOs will probably be very hard to out of reach :)

you can get the single axis and do planets or blow your savings and do DSOs too, its up to you :P

[mickoking]

Gday cobbers,

I going to purchase a single axis drive for my EQ5 mounted refractor. It is for visual work and will be sufficient (for me).

[Starkler]

Let me know how it goes Micko, Im considering doing the same for an eq5 I just bought :)

[stinky]

Mick - I have a refractor on an Eq 5 - considerng installing dual motors (about $300) - or will upgrade to a CG5