Automatically Tracking the Sun

For the past few years, I've been going back and forth on whether to purchase a little mount and tripod that can automatically track the sun.  This upcoming solar eclipse nudged me to go ahead and purchase this little piece of gear of convenience.  The solar eclipse happens very quickly so any automated gear will help.  I want to get as many exceptional photos as possible during this very short couple of minutes and this will likely be my last total solar eclipse of my lifetime.

This mount with its lightweight tripod is quite small and lightweight which is nice.  Another nice feature is that it is relatively inexpensive for an automatic tracking mount.  

This particular mount is made by Skywatcher and is called the SolarQuest.  After leveling this mount, you simply turn it on.  It will automatically connect to satellites to attain the necessary GPS data and then it will slew to the sun automatically and begin tracking the sun.  You can't get easier than that!

This nice little mount comes with a lightweight tripod and extension.  The extension is seen in the photo below.  This extension moves the telescope up higher so that it won't hit the tripod legs when the sun is high in the sky although that really is not a problem at my latitude.  The sun is always low in the sky in my neck of the woods.  It is nice to get the telescope up higher though even if only to ease back pain due to bending over.

This photo below shows the sensor that finds the sun and keeps it centered in your field of view...

Skywatcher calls this little solar guide scope its Heliofind...

Since this is a very automated telescope mount, the controls are rather simple.  There is a power button and an eight directional pad for centering the sun.  

Once you center the sun using the directional pad, you just press the power button twice to save the new centering for tracking.  Some telescopes do not sit on their dovetail bar perfectly squarely so having a way to manually fine tune the centering of the sun is great.  Or, if you want to center on a particular sunspot or prominence, you can do it with this mount and it will continue to keep that feature centered for hours.

There is a bubble level on the tripod as well as on top of the mount head making leveling fast and easy...

Below is a photo of the saddle that comes with the SolarQuest mount.  This is a rather cheap cast aluminum saddle.  I've had cast aluminum saddles break on me in the past so this is probably the weakest part of this mount.  Also, the bolt on this type of saddle will mar your dovetail bar which I find quite annoying so I have ordered a replacement saddle that is far better.  That should arrive tomorrow. 

I actually have a couple of extra saddles sitting around with the rest of my astronomy parts but the mounting hole arrangement on this little mount is non-standard.  I needed to have a saddle made to order specifically for this mount.  The replacement saddle is sturdier and safer so I'm looking forward to swapping out the saddle for the better one.

I could have adapted one of my spare saddles to work on this SolarQuest mount but that would have required about two hours of work (or more) and my health (including my spine) is in no condition to do that so I ordered a saddle to fit this SolarQuest perfectly.

Now...  if only the sun would come out so I can test this new automatic mount!