Telescope Accessories

It depends on what you own. If you have a solar telescope, buy the SunLock Solar Finder at $49.99 and a hard case. Finding the Sun and not damaging the instrument are the two problems everyone hits in the first month. If you image on an iEXOS-100, buy the polar finder first, because alignment quality sets a ceiling on everything else.

They do different jobs. The clamshell ring wraps the tube. The dovetail bar bolts to the ring and slides into the mount saddle. On most setups you need both, though some telescopes ship with one or the other already fitted. Check what came in the box before ordering.

Longer bars give you more range to slide the telescope fore and aft, which is how you balance the mount. If you are visual only with a light setup, 4 inch is fine. If you hang a camera, filter wheel and focuser off the back, go to 6 or 12 inch. The extra cost is small compared to fighting a mount that will not balance.

For solar and lunar work, most people who try one say yes. Using both eyes suppresses floaters and noise in your visual system, so faint low contrast structure like filaments and granulation becomes easier to hold. It is a comfort upgrade as much as a detail upgrade. It is not a good first purchase, but it is a very good third or fourth one.

Pressure tuning shifts an etalon on and off the hydrogen-alpha line by changing air pressure in a sealed chamber. Doing that by hand means touching the telescope, which shakes it. The PC-USB controller moves the tuning from a computer, so you can hunt for the best band on prominences and then on the disk without disturbing a capture run.

It is built for Lunt solar imaging trains. It shortens focal length by a factor of 0.8, which usually means the difference between a full solar disk that fits your sensor and one that does not, and it flattens field curvature so the corners stay sharp. Tell us your telescope and camera and we will work out the resulting image scale before you order.

GoTo pointing and polar alignment are separate problems. A GoTo mount can find objects while still tracking imperfectly because its polar axis is not aimed at the celestial pole. For visual work you may not care. For any exposure longer than a few seconds you will. The polar finder at $79.99 is the cheapest fix.

The 45 degree erect image version gives a correctly oriented view, which matters if you use the telescope for terrestrial daytime viewing. The 90 degree prism is more comfortable for looking at things high in the sky and generally gives a slightly better image, but the view is mirror reversed. Solar and astronomical observers usually take the 90 degree.

Many of them, yes. The dovetail bars use the standard Vixen profile, the diagonals and the binoviewer use standard 1.25 inch fittings, and the power items are generic. The clamshell ring, the hard cases, the reducer and the pressure tuner controller are matched to Lunt bodies. If you are combining brands, call (855) 501-0541 and we will confirm the fit.

Because the box is designed to survive one trip from a warehouse, not a hundred trips to a dark site in the back of a car. A telescope that arrives with its collimation intact and its etalon undisturbed is worth the $120.99 to $315.99 a case costs. If you travel with the instrument at all, this is not really optional.

The two things that most change what you see are eyepieces and the mount under the telescope. Our eyepieces collection includes a dedicated solar eyepiece, and mounts and tripods covers tripods and tracking heads. The buying guide explains how to split a budget between the three.

Yes. Free shipping applies across the whole store, from the smallest adapter to the largest telescope. There is no minimum and no handling fee added at the last step of checkout.