A beginner’s guide to mounts

Paul Money The basic types explained, plus what to consider when buying

Try holding even a small telescope for any length of time and it will quickly become apparent that you need something to support it – this vital piece of any setup is the mount. There are several types, and which one is best for you, and indeed how much you’ll have to pay for it, depends on what you want to use your telescope for. The mounts available to today’s amateur astronomers suit a range of needs, from a simple tripod right up to a sophisticated instrument fit for an observatory.

Most mounts are a variant of two basic designs, altazimuth (altaz) and equatorial. Altaz mounts move in two axes, one perpendicular to the horizon (altitude, giving an up and down motion) and the other parallel to the ground (azimuth, giving horizontal motion), but most basic designs cannot track the sky – though there are a few exceptions.

In equatorial mounts, one of the axes is parallel to that of Earth’s rotation, meaning they can track the night sky and keep targets centred in the field of view, provided they are properly polar aligned prior to use. This makes them ideal for prolonged observing or for long-exposure astrophotography. Devised by renowned amateur John Dobson, the Dobsonian is a simple rocker box on a turntable made from basic materials that supports a large Newtonian reflector. The design is an easy to use, manually operated altaz system, although there are now some computerised models that can track the sky.

There are other considerations to take into account. If you want a permanent setup, then a heavy-duty mount with excellent tracking would be ideal. Being portable and easy to set up may be a more practical solution for some, perhaps where space is limited, so a lightweight but robust mount could be a better choice.

Similarly, you need to consider the mount’s payload capacity – in other words, how much weight can it support? Remember, if you want to do any astrophotography, this weight has to account for all of your kit, not just the telescope. Can the mounttelescope system be easily dismantled if