Mounts & Tripods

Alt-azimuth if you mostly want to look at things, equatorial if you want them to stay in view. An alt-azimuth mount moves up and down and left to right, which is intuitive but means chasing the target with two controls. An equatorial mount, once its polar axis points roughly at the pole, follows the sky's drift with a single control. The Twilight Nano at $99.99 and the EXOS Nano at $129.99 let you try either for roughly the same money.

Leg diameter. The ST2 uses 1.5 inch steel legs at $193.00; the ST3 uses 2 inch legs at $299.99. Thicker legs damp vibration faster, so a bump at the eyepiece settles in a second rather than five. If you image, or if the telescope is long and catches wind, take the ST3.

Five of the nine include a head: the Twilight Nano, the Twilight I, the EXOS Nano, the iEXOS-100-02 and the EXOS2-GT. The four ST2 and ST3 tripods are legs only, sized for Explore Scientific mount heads. If you are not sure which head your telescope needs, call us before ordering legs on their own.

It is Explore Scientific's motion control system, and it uses eight independent CPUs to drive the mount's stepper motors. In practice that means the mount finds objects for you and then tracks them, and you drive it from a tablet or phone over WiFi or Bluetooth through the ExploreStars app rather than a hand controller on a cable. Both PMC-Eight mounts here are also ASCOM compatible, so imaging software can control them directly.

Payload and portability. The iEXOS-100-02 at $299.99 carries around 19 pounds visually and 15 pounds for imaging, and the whole thing weighs under 15 pounds, so it travels easily. The EXOS2-GT at $999.99 takes 40 pounds visually and 28 pounds for astrophotography on a stainless steel tripod, and weighs 30 pounds before counterweights. Buy the smaller one for a short refractor, the larger one if you are imaging with anything substantial.

Nothing except how it looks. The black and white versions of each tripod use the same steel, the same height range and the same load rating. Pick whichever matches your telescope, or whichever you can find in the dark more easily.

Through a ring and a bar. A clamshell mounting ring at $85.99 wraps the tube, and a Vixen style dovetail bar from $25.99 bolts to the ring and slides into the mount saddle. Longer bars give you more room to balance a heavy imaging train. Both are in telescope accessories.

For visual observing a rough alignment by eye is fine, and takes under a minute. For imaging it needs to be accurate, which is what a polar finder is for. The EXOS2-GT ships with one. On the iEXOS-100-02 the polar finder at $79.99 and the azimuth adjuster at $59.99 both make the process repeatable.

The usual guidance is that a mount should be rated for noticeably more than the telescope weighs, and that the margin should be larger for imaging than for visual work. A mount at its limit will technically hold the telescope and still shake at every touch. Tell us the telescope and what you plan to do with it and we will tell you honestly whether a tripod upgrade is the right spend.

It is the least glamorous upgrade in astronomy and one of the most noticeable. Vibration at the eyepiece is what stops you pushing magnification, and no amount of optical quality fixes it. Going from 1.5 inch to 2 inch legs for $106.99 more changes every session you have afterwards.

Yes, and solar is one of the cases where stability matters most, because you are usually observing at high magnification through daytime air. Smaller Lunt tubes sit fine on a Twilight Nano or an ST2, mid sized ones want the Twilight I or an ST3, and the largest belong on the EXOS2-GT. Pair any of them with a clamshell ring and dovetail bar, and see solar telescopes for the instruments themselves.

No. A Dobsonian comes with its own rocker box base and does not use a tripod at all. That is part of why Dobsonians give you so much aperture for the money: none of the budget goes into a mount.

Yes. Free shipping applies across the whole store, including the heavy items. There is no minimum order and no oversize surcharge added at the last step of checkout.