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Comment by penagwin | Hacker News Reader

Hmm this appears to be an alt-az mount. If they made a future version as an equitorial mount it would be even better for radioastronamy, and if it's strong enough astrophotography too. They're a lot more complicated though so it's understandable why they didn't go that route.

Especially if this is meant more for geostationary satellites and I'm guessing most satellites like NOAA aren't too bothered by the slightly rougher tracking. Plus I guess the passes are fairly short anyway...

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I thought equatorial mount is much simpler than Alt-Az for astronomy, hence why the earliest large telescopes used them. All you needed was to align the mount correctly, and then a simple clock can run the movement.

Alt-Az requires a computer to tell the dials where to go at every step of the way and are very non-linear dependent on absolute position on the sky.

Also Alt-Az gives a much more compact design. So as long as you have the computer to control it, isn't Alt-Az preferable?

That’s correct, but equatorial mounts also solve the problem of field rotation on long exposures (which, like the control problem, can be fixed with computers—-just stack short exposures and rotate in software). Field rotation isn’t an issue for radio astronomy, of course.

I’m not sure I would say that equatorial mounts are less compact though.

Correct its and "Az-El rotator" intended for amateur radio and was not designed with any other purposes in mind, but this is just the first release. Main objectives were price and simplicity. But I hope to get a good enough response to release other versions in the future, especially a much tougher all-metal weatherproof version.

Hey, great product

Thanks! As often with great products it just started as a cool personal project but before I even had it finished, people started giving me requests.

Just add an equatorial wedge. Search terms: "DIY equatorial wedge"

Thx for the tip! Lots of different upgrades should be available later on and also I hope to build a community of open source designs and addons

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