Borg Alt-Az Mount For Small Refractors

Telescope mounts have become an obsession with me over the last year or so. Unless you are buying a Dobsonian, where the mount is part of the basic OTA, every telescope you buy must be mounted. If that telescope is a refractor, you have three basic choices: Fork (yes, there are a few refractors so mounted, such as the newer sub-100mm Meade and Celestron GOTO systems); Equatorial mounts (the largest and the most complex to set up - albeit usually the most versatile); and the Alt-Az mounts. The last are generally the simplest to set up, the lightest and the most inexpensive. They have their limitations, but for a quick set up and for general use, they are hard to beat.

In glancing through the Borg catalog and web site (www.hutech.com) I saw a simple Alt-Az mount pictured carrying several variations of the smaller Borg refractors, all based on the 80mm main tube set. (See the related reviews of the Borg 80mm 'family' elsewhere at this site.) Intrigued, and while I said to myself that I needed another Alt-Az mount like I needed a spare head, it looked very small, light, and - oh well, why not.

A week later, a package from Hutech (the Borg distributor in the US) arrived and the mount (Part # 3101, and $247) and the plastic tube ring necessary to mount one of the Borg 80mm OTAs (Part # 5503, $49) was sitting in my hand - quite literally!

I should be used to light and small from Borg by now, but this was the smallest and lightest mount I has ever seen. The whole thing, with tube ring attached, is a very light handful, the mount weighing 680g - or just a little more than the bare 76ED objective lens itself - and the tube ring another, well nothing at all to the weight of the mount. My first impression of the tube ring was that while it was plastic, it was reasonably well made and looked like it would hold the lightweight Borg tubes and my 2.9 pound Tak FS-60C just fine.

The mount itself has an ¼"-20 thread on the base for attachment to any standard photo tripod. (The pictures show it attached to my Velbon carbon fiber 640.) If you want to use it with a 'poor man's wedge', use a regular tripod tilt head, and you are in business.

The mount works as follows: The knobs at the base and upper right side of the mount are clutches that allow you to loosen them, move the scope to the desired location, and then tighten them to lock into the desired position. In use, this will allow you to loosen them completely for gross movement, and then tighten them gradually to maintain a little 'drag' and then - when you are where you think you need to be- tighten them down the last bit and go to the slow motion controls for 'fine tuning.'

The two gray knobs at the top and bottom of the rear portion of the arm are the slow motion controls. They are fairly smooth and allow very good positioning. (I was able to 'fine tune' the 76 ED using high power on the Moon, moving up and down a large crater wall searching for detail using the knobs without overshooting and while controlling the speed very nicely.)

In use, the mount handled the 50 and 76 Borg refractors and my Takahashi FS-60C without any problems and with only minimal vibration. With the heavier weight of the 100 ED objective, the mount was sensitive to wind and vibration, although my wife liked that package in combination with the Velbon tripod, and uses it when I can persuade her to come out and observe with me. (So, a dissenting vote in the Novoselsky household on this one!!!!

Do I recommend this mount. Yes, with some qualifications. It works fine, and the controls are surprisingly smooth, with scopes up to the size, length, and weight of the Borg 76 ED. (My wife disagrees, as noted above.) Will it handle the weight or length of other scopes that other Alt-Az mount such as the Giro-2 Deluxe? No.

However, we are once again looking at size and convenience in the decision. As you can tell from the photos, this is an extraordinarily small and light mount, and very reasonably priced. For use in a small, easy to set up, and easy to transport observing package, it comes into its own very quickly. I left it sitting on top of the Velbon tripod inside its bag and with the tube ring attached - without even noticing the weight difference. It takes only a second to set up the tripod with the mount attached, and then slide the OTA inside the ring to be up and observing.

So, yet another good choice for the person who wants a fast and light mount for travel and 'quick grab.'

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