| This lightweight Celestron medium duty altazimuth mount makes a lot of sense as a grab and go mount for terrestrial nature study and casual astronomical observing. It’s particularly good with Celestron’s SkyMaster 20x80mm and 25x100mm binoculars, Ultima 80 and 100 spotting scopes, C90 and C130 Maksutov spotting scopes, and the C5 Schmidt-Cassegrain spotting scope. Of course, it can also be used with any other brand of spotting scope or binocular capable of being mounted on a camera tripod and weighing no more than 10 lbs. The mount’s adjustable height aluminum tripod has a maximum extended height of 45” and a folded height of 32”. A metal accessory tray helps to both lock the tripod legs in place and hold eyepieces or accessories up and out of the dew-soaked grass. The no-tool standard camera tripod 1/4”-20 thread mounting bolt is installed in a slot in the long scope mounting plate. This allows you to slide the spotting scope or binocular back and forth on the mount head to find the proper balance point. Flexible slow motion cables are provided to let you fine-tune the pointing of your scope or binocular and to smoothly follow objects as they move across the sky or landscape. There is a lock in azimuth, in addition to the slow motion control, to allow the mount head to be moved in a 360° circle. There is no separate altitude lock. The coarse adjustment in altitude is controlled by a built-in friction clutch, while fine adjustment is done using the slow motion control cable. Simply tilt the scope or binocular up and down by hand until the desired vertical angle is reached (the friction clutch will hold it in place), and make any further fine-tuning altitude adjustments with the slow motion control. The amount of vertical friction can be adjusted to compensate for exceptionally heavy optical instruments by tightening the altitude axis bolt with a pliers or crescent wrench (not supplied). |
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