My telescope mount decided to do the electric slide at 2 AM

So last Saturday I finally got a clear night to try out my new deep sky camera setup. Everything was going great, I had my polar alignment dialed in and I was taking 5 minute exposures of the Orion Nebula. About an hour in, I went inside to grab some coffee and when I came back out, my mount was making this horrible grinding noise. The tracking had completely failed and the mount was just shaking back and forth like it was having a seizure. I checked the cables, the power supply, and even the hand controller but nothing worked. Turns out the clutch knobs on my mount had somehow loosened up on their own and the whole thing was basically freewheeling. I lost about 90 minutes of data and had to start over from scratch. Has anyone else had their mount loosen up like that in the middle of a session?

2 comments

2 Comments

zarab2421d ago

Oh man, that stinks. I read that some mounts have issues with the clutch knobs vibrating loose during longer exposures, especially if they're not tightened down enough from the start. Tbh, I'd try a tiny bit of blue loctite on the threads to keep them from backing out again.

drew69021d ago

Did you check if the clutch knobs were just not tight enough to begin with though? @zarab24 might be onto something with the loctite but I’ve had mine slip a tiny bit and it wasn’t that big of a deal.