Quote:
Originally Posted by rally
Heath,
If you want the mount for visual use - get anything you like - it really won't matter greatly so long as it can handle the payload and you take care setting it up.
But . . . if you want it for astrophotography as you say then you really need to consider this more carefully.
Standard rule of thumb is spend at least half your budget on the mount - if not more.
By the time you add all the neccessary stuff to your scope (and much depends on what type and level of astrophotography you want to aspire to or be involved with) you will need a bigger mount, a more stable mount and most likely (highly recommended) an equatorial mount.
Planetary and lunar photography is much less forgiving, since you are stacking and aligning multiple short exposures, but DSOs and other long exposure imaging are very demanding on mount stability - you will find it very difficult to get high or even good quality astroimages with a low budget mount.
So the two concepts "a budget visual mount" and "a good astroimaging mount" are virtually mutually exclusive concepts !
Unless you are very lucky in the second hand market.
My recommendation would be an EQ6 at the minimum.
Otherwise you will find yourself upgrading at the expense of 1. your pocket and 2. a lot of lost opportunity and fighting to get good results from something that cannot be achieved.
An Alt/Az mount will give field rotation and two levels of gear errors ! Generally these are built much lighter and have much less accuracy.
Maybe go along to a few star parties and see what people are doing with what mounts and see what they are achieveing and if that is the sort of result you would be happy with, and also decide on what area of astrophotography interests you.
Cheers
Rally
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Thanks for the advice Rally and Brian. Since the weekend has been dreadful, I've been having a go at building a viewing mount for the backyard. Very interesting, frustrating but hopefully rewarding project. I will go a budget mount for on the go but realise I will need to save for a good mount for the photography side. I saved for and bought the Canon 5D Mark II so have a very capable full frame camera now. The scope I bought off IIS and I believe this will also be a very good imaging scope. I cant really compromise this now by buying an under performing mount. Still have plenty of kit to buy to do imaging as well (Guide scope, guiding camera, filters etc) so will be a work in progress. Will have to be satisfied with viewing for the meantime and shooting the milky way from the tripod.