I’ve invested in an EQ-6 Pro Mount to help me keep my camera’s pointing in the right direction (see the Equipment page for details).

I took the tube from my Skywatcher 250 Dobsonian and added tube rings to allow it to be mounted on the EQ. I’ve left the dob bearings in place as the dob mount makes a handy stand for the tube when its not in use. The 2 counter-weights that ship with mount are not enough to balance the 10″ tube so I added a 5Kg body building weight that I picked up for £4 from the local supermarket.

I had a few problems with the alignment at first but that was down to trying to use on a cloudy night when I couldn’t do more than a 1 star alignment. As soon as I carried out a 3 star alignment the mount worked fine. I found the Polar Finder very useful for getting the scope polar aligned as I was a bit confused by all the conflicting instructions on the Internet and in the manual. For example the manual says use the upper numbers on the RA setting circle, but instructions online say use the lower numbers.