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Mounting 100mm binoculars on an Equatorial Mount

Started by DaFont, 12/10/2013 05:24PM
Posted 12/10/2013 05:24PM Opening Post
Does it make sense to mount a pair of binoculars on a Go To equatorial mount? I've recently purchased an iOptron Zeq25 and want to see if it makes sense to mount giant binoculars to it.
Thanks
DAF
Posted 12/10/2013 10:25PM #1
David, I've used many different binoculars over the years, up to 100mm diameter. I can't imagine using the difficult viewing angles an equatorial mount would present. By far my favorite binocular mount is a parallelogram style.

George
Posted 12/11/2013 03:11PM #2
David,

Unless your binoculars have 45 or 90 degree diagonals, then you'll have neck-breaking positions to get into, like George said. That said, if you're willing to put up with that, or can find a way around it, then it's kind of cool to have your binoculars track the sky. One of our club members did his binocular Messier list with just such a set-up. He said it was great to be able to consult a star chart without having to do his star-hopping all over from the beginning each time.

I could swear I've seen some posts here of people making a bracket that allowed them to mount binoculars to a fork mount, like a salvaged LX-90 or LX-200 or CPC mount... You'd still have some contorting to do, but not nearly so much as if you were looking in the SW sky with binoculars on an equatorial mount.