Comment by donkeybeer 5 days ago
So do you think that complex mechanism ended up no better than the normal mounts? It could be execution too, I am no good at experiments and sometimes even "proven" designs end up a bit subpar, so it could be the design was alright.
Oh ok. I didn't know harmonic drives were standard in commercial mounts.
They have become popular in the last few years. They are smaller, lighter and thus more portable than traditional mounts. They also don’t need to be balanced with a counter-weight (although they usually allow for a counter weight to increase payload capacity, they don’t need to be perfectly balanced). This all saves in set-up time.
One disadvantage compared to traditional mounts is that they absolutely need guidance, and with a pretty fast guide loop at that (like 0.5s). You can’t do long unguided exposures with a strain wave. But anyone who’s serious about astrophotography is guiding anyway so that’s not really a big deal.
I am a bit idly curious since I plan to build a telescope sometime. Nothing as complex as this, just a manually guided dobson.
Not sure what you mean with complex mechanism. The mount has a similar architecture to other commercially available mounts like the HEM15 iPolar for example.