Old Mount is Now Fully Manual
M y slow motion control knobs arrived this morning. I quickly pulled the gears off each axis of my old mount and installed these new knobs in place of the gears. I had been, very briefly, using the old gears as slow motion control knobs until these new knobs arrived. These new knobs make it very easy to slowly track astronomical objects manually as the objects slowly drift across the sky. Well... really, the Earth is rotating and the astronomical objects are stationary by comparison but they appear to drift across the sky in an arcing pattern. The upper photo shows the Declination axis while the lower photo shows the Right Ascension axis. These knobs are just the right size for easy fingertip control of slow tracking. Here, below, is a photo of the Declination axis gear that I removed this morning. The gear shaft is a standard 1/4" shaft so finding nice knobs to the replace the gears was very easy. For a short while, I thought about just using the gear as a slow motion