Quote:
Originally Posted by aiesh_kaul
Thanks for the response guys. But these ones are all GoTo scopes and I am looking for a manual one. Is there a manual one ?
Thanks,
Jimmy
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A basic Dobsonian mount is a fully manual Alt-Az mount.
The Celestron SLT mount only works as a powered mount (you can push it in Altitude, but I think you would damage the Azimuth drive if you pushed it to slew horizontally), but you can just drive it around the sky if you can't be bothered aligning it. (But seriously, it takes about two minutes to do a 2-star align, and then it will find and track any target, so why WOULDN'T you align it at the start of each viewing session?!)
The computerised Go-To fork mounts can be used as a manual mount by just releasing the clutches and pushing it around the sky, or you can drive it with the motors without aligning - but again, alignment on the modern mounts is quick and painless, so it is worth learning how the process works.
If you're asking why it's hard to find a basic Alt-Az mount bigger than an AZ-3 - I think the answer is that there's probably no real call for it - but if it bugs you, as noted by an earlier poster, just put your EQ mount with the polar axis horizontal and Voila! - it is now an Alt-Az mount!