If you want to embark on astrophotography, owning an equatorial mounts isn’t just desirable, it’s essential.
As the Earth turns on its axis, the sky above seems to spin, with stars rising in the east and setting in the west. If you point a camera at a certain point in the night sky and leave it on an exposure longer than 30 seconds, you’ll notice that the images of the stars become trailed as they move during the time of the exposure. If your intention is not to take images of star trails (which is an art form in itself) then you need to be able to track the motion of the stars throughout the exposure, so that they appear as sharp points of light, rather than trails. This is where an equatorial mount is crucial.
When you buy an equatorial mount, you want one that tracks smoothly and accurately, with quiet motors so you don’t wake the neighbors, has long battery life on cold nights, can carry all the equipment that you’re going to put on it (telescope, eyepieces, filters, cameras and so on) and which fits with your budget.
So which do you choose? For the uninitiated, there’s a bewildering amount of choice, but I have selected a few that cover a range of requirements and budgets.
Gemma works for the European Space Agency and was the editor of All About Space magazine. She is the author of several books including "Quantum Physics in Minutes", and "Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual to the Large Hadron Collider". She holds a degree in physical sciences, a Master’s in astrophysics and a PhD in computational astrophysics.
The Quick List
With a mighty payload capacity and a delightful setup process, this is a well-engineered system that supports accurate exposures. Read more below…
It’s not rated for supporting heavyweight equipment, but it does have a wide choice of options for alignment and tracking. Read more below…
This compact mount supports any payload outside of the most extravagant, with powerful enough tracking to keep up. Read more below…
Individual tuning by hand in the factory makes all the difference when it comes to using this powerful but elegant system. Read more below…
Best equatorial mounts
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Best equatorial mount overall
Sky-Watcher’s EQ6-R PRO SynScan is a delight to set up and use, with some nifty extra features thrown in. Its large payload capacity means that it can mount almost any feasible combination of telescope and imaging accessories. We can safely say that if you get this mount, you probably won’t ever need to upgrade to another because it can handle pretty much anything.
Two features provide the key to its success. One is the inbuilt polarscope, for aligning the mount on the Pole Star, Polaris. Rather than looking through an eyepiece, the view through the polarscope is displayed on the hand controller’s screen. Then you just have to adjust the alt-az bolts to centre Polaris in the field of view – it was dead easy when we tried it, and didn’t require any further accessories or software. Just be aware that the polarscope has an illuminated reticle: we found that you’ll need to turn the illumination down, or the view will be obscured by a red glow.
Second is the periodic error correction (PEC) facility, which corrects for backlash caused by gaps between the motor gears. PEC ‘trains’ the mount to compensate for the backlash. It’s pretty straightforward, involving slewing to any star near the celestial equator – we selected one of the stars of Orion’s Belt – then tracking that star using ‘PEC Training Mode’. Subsequently, we found that the PEC was consistently successful in maintaining sub-arcsecond accuracy while tracking deep-sky objects across the sky, allowing us to take longer exposures before any tracking errors could interfere. Rarely were exposures wasted, making for far more efficient data capture.
Best equatorial mount for light telescopes
Sky-Watcher’s EQ5 PRO SynScan equatorial Go-To mount is the perfect example of a great mount that wants to work with you, not against you. Out of the box, the setup was straightforward; and out under the sky, the polar alignment was wonderfully versatile, with one, two, and three-star alignment options.
Why would you need so many alignment options? It all depends on your needs. If you’re just out under the stars for a bit of quick grab-and-go astronomy before it clouds over again, one-star alignment is sufficient. We found that under one-star alignment, the Go-To was placing our chosen targets in the center of the field of view to within an accuracy of about an arc-minute – certainly good enough for a spot of visual observing.
Of course, if you’re planning an all-night session obtaining deep exposures, you’re going to want to opt for the three-star alignment for maximum accuracy – and we found the tracking to be mostly spot on.
There are 10 different slew speeds to get you around the sky and to track objects (not everything moves at the rate of stars – the Moon, planets, and some comets will track faster than the background stars). Thankfully the motors are fairly quiet, even at the fastest slewing speed.
Where the mount is limited is in its carrying capacity. Though it’s a stable, even chunky build, it’s not a heavyweight mount, with a 9.1-kilogram payload capacity. This limits the mount to smaller telescopes, but we were confident with it carrying a 6-inch refractor with room to spare for imaging accessories. It could probably carry a five-inch reflector, but not larger apertures.
Best equatorial mount for heavy telescopes
The CGX is widely hailed as Celestron’s best astrophotography mount, and having given it a spin, we’d have to agree. It succeeds over its predecessors thanks to advances in its mechanics: improved motors facilitate smoother, quieter slewing. Even the tracking capabilities of heavy-duty mounts can become sluggish when a ton of equipment is mounted on them; not so the CGX, which happily copes with large payloads with all the comfort of a championship weightlifter.
So what, exactly, is so improved? It’s all in the design of the worm drive in the mount’s motor, which is now belt-driven and spring-loaded, leaving out unnecessary gear cogs where gaps in the gear teeth can cause a backlash. The mount slews wonderfully smoothly as a result, with nine different slew speeds to choose from. On top of this, there’s Periodic Error Correction, and it all resulted in an extremely good performance.
The CGX is a heavy-lifter, designed for large telescope apertures of between 6 and 11 inches – light buckets for capturing the faintest of galaxies and nebulae. The equatorial head has a low profile, making the mount more compact and therefore more stable and not prone to wobbling, unlike some larger models. It also features professional-level control software, which Celestron has designed in conjunction with a high-end instrument manufacturer, Planewave Instruments. All in all, the CGX oozes quality.
There’s also the CGX-L, which seriously ups the already impressive payload credentials among other enhancements, but costs around 80 per cent more than the CGX.
Best premium equatorial mount
The Losmandy GM811G is hand-tuned in the factory, ensuring that the engineering and resulting performance of every single mount produced is optimized. As we found out during our hands-on time, that makes a heck of a difference, both in terms of the feel of the build quality, and what the mount is like to use.
The GM811G is a hybrid of two of Losmandy’s previous mounts, the smaller GM8 model and the weightlifter that is the G11. The GM811G combines the relatively lightweight mount of the G8 with the large carrying capacity of the G11. This ratio of weight to carrying capacity is extremely helpful, especially if you have to regularly lug the mount to your favorite dark-sky location of a star party.
The GM811G comes with all the bells and whistles that you’d expect – periodic error correction, a huge Go-To database, and a hand controller, the Gemini 2, which really deserves a mention here. Unlike most other hand controllers with their five-line LED monochrome screens, the Gemini 2 is furnished with a color touch-screen, finally bringing hand controllers into the 21st century. You can even connect it to your PC using a USB cable, and mate it to your favorite planetarium software.
There are two options for tripods: the lightweight (LW) model or the chunkier heavy-duty (HD) version, for when you really want to load up the mount. For carrying a five-inch imaging refractor and associated paraphernalia – CCD, filter wheel etc – the LW tripod is more than up to the task. The mount smoothly cruises around the sky – somewhat noisily, be we found its GoTo accuracy to be spot-on, with minimal backlash.
The mount is pricy, but if you want a mount that has received personal care from someone in the factory rather than just come off a production line, and has a high carrying capacity and exceptional tracking, the GM811G is the one for you.
How to choose the best equatorial mount
I’m new to astrophotography – why do I need an equatorial mount?
If you want to capture the night sky in its fullest detail, you need to use long exposures. But, as the Earth rotates, stars will move within your image frame during the exposure, causing either a loss in sharpness or star trails, which are created by the same stars exposing multiple times.
You therefore need a mount for your camera that has the ability to move in alignment with the stars, so that they seem to remain in the same place for the duration of your exposure.
Star-trackers are simple lightweight mounts for wide-angle night sky images, where you use a regular lens with your camera. They’re a great way to dip your toe into astrophotography, and you can read our guide to the best star-trackers to learn more about them.
The next step up is a full telescopic mount, like the equatorial mounts we look at there. These take the weight of a telescope; you can then attach your camera to the telescope via an adapter ring, effectively turning your telescope into a super-long-distance telephoto lens. Now you can capture smaller segments of the night sky in glorious detail.
As well as the extra weight they can take, equatorial mounts typically feature GoTo technology, which enables the telescope to point to a specific star or constellation of your choice.
Is it complicated to set up an equatorial mount so that it’s ready for use?
The main thing you have to do is to help your system understand where it should be pointing, which is pretty straightforward with modern mounts.
The rotation of the night sky is around an axis centered on the celestial pole. The closest star to this pole is Polaris, the famous Pole Star, and all the stars appear to rotate around this spot. And so, to track the movement of the stars, the telescope mount must also rotate around this point. Enabling your mount and telescope can do this requires a simple process called polar alignment, but you need an equatorial mount to make it possible.
For contrast, alt-azimuth mounts simply move up and down and left and right, rather than following the arc of the stars around the sky, which makes tracking for long exposures impossible.
To polar align, you must first set the tilt of the polar axis to match your latitude. Manual equatorial mounts will feature setting circles that allow you to do this, but with computerized Go-To equatorial mounts you can simply set your location using the database in the hand controller, and following an alignment procedure that targets several bright stars that are then matched to their positions in the database, so the mount knows exactly where its location is. This is particularly handy if you don’t know your latitude!
Then, target the Pole Star in the finderscope (you can also invest in a small polarscope that provides more accurate fine-tuning so you are pointed exactly at the celestial pole). Once done, you can rest assured that your equatorial mount is polar aligned, and if you’re imaging using a motorised mount, you can do so safe in the knowledge that your image will feature pinpoint stars, not long star trails.
