There are different ways of making telescope mountings, but today almost all of them are of the type Altitude-azimuth or Equatorial.

The earliest known mountings are known as altitude-azimuth, or alt-az mountings. The name refers to the way the mounting moves the telescope in either the altitude, up or down, or azimuth, side to side. This type of mounting is used for practically all larger professionel telescopes. It also has a market in the very inexpensive systems to hobby astronomers.

If you tilt the Alt/az mount in the horizontal direction until it is parallel to Earth's equatorial plane, you get an Equatorial mount. Almost all mounts sold today to the amateur astronomer, is of the Equatorial type.

So why has Track The Stars made an Alt-az mounting to the serious amateur astronomer? There are several reasons why we find this type of mounting superior to the Equatorial mounting:

Transportability

The construction nature of the Equatorial mounting, is not making it handy to lift or put into a small box.
From a construction stability viewpoint the forces acting on the Equatorial mounting is not well distributed, so there has to be added more material to get stability, and therefore adding more weight.
The Alt-az mounting is providing a platform where all the force from the telescope-weight, when properly balanced, is distributed straight down through the construction.

Useability

The Alt-az mounting is not tilting your eyepiece while it is tracking. You adjust your eyepiece and any finder scopes in the angle you prefer, and it will stay there avoiding tiresome adjustments after each goto. Meridian flip known to all Equatorial mountings is also avoided, meaning you can observe undisturbed across all parts of the sky. These are some of the reasons we say that TTS-160 is the worlds best mounting for visual observations. This is particular important for binoviewers.

Fast setup

With Alt-az you do not need to polar align to get precise tracking! This is the reason the mounting is very fast to setup. It takes five minutes to assemble the mounting, attaching the telescope, balancing the telescope AND aligning it (See video). You only have to know the position and names of two stars and you are up and running.

All alignment is done in software, so it is not nessesary for the physical mount to be placed horizontally, consequently saving a lot of time.
In the extreme case you can align it parallel to Earth's equatorial plane and it will behave like an Equatorial mount.

We believe that our customers will be more eager to use their mounting if they can be "up and running" fast. This simply means that you, with an TTS-160, will have more time watching the sky, instead of using time adjusting the mount. We have reduced your barrier to "get going".

Astrophotography

The single most significant reasons why Alt-az mounts is not sold to ameteur astronomers, is the limitation it has, with rotating the field of view around the object you are tracking. This makes it less usable for astronphotography as it smear out the image when taking long exposures.
To overcome this problem, Track the stars has adressed this issue thoroughly and has even inventet a new solution to get rid of field rotation. Read more

Takes up  less space.
Due to the simpel construction of an Alt-az mount, we have been able to make a nice designed mount that do not take up much space under use. This makes it a nice choise if you have a home observatory setup.

Nice design

We, at Track The Stars, have the opinion that satisfaction in daily life is increased when using well designed products.

In our own opinion, because of the Alt-az design, we have been able to design a mount that even your wife would alow in the living room. Again we have lowered the barrier for you to "get going".

Stability

The Alt/az design makes it possible to design an optimum weight contra stability mount. We do not need a contra weight on the side of the mount which makes a variable bend to the mount while tracking. On our mount, the forces from telescope and counterweights is distributed directly down through the pier regardless of where you look on the sky.

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