Telescope Reviews: Video carbon fiber tripods for teegul

Yes, and a very definite yes. I have a Teegul mount and along the way replaced the original tripod with a Bogen 3068. This worked well, but when I got my TMB92SS, the whole rig was still a bit heavier than I would have liked for a Grab&Go, and so I decided to splurge and get the Gitzo5530s carbon-fibre tripod which has a load limit of around 50+ lbs. Yes, this is horribly expensive, but yes, it is worth it. It's a magnificent tripod - cut a good 8lbs of the carrying weight, while providing well under sub-1 second damping times - even at very high powers. In fact, at 250x I can keep my hand on the focusser and focus the scope to perfection - it's that stable. It's vastly more stable than my only slightly larger/heavier TMB 105/650 on the 3068 which had around 2-3 second dampening times with vibration suppression pads underneath it (haven't bothered with them with the Gitzo tripod).

I have a DM6 as well which I use with my NP-127. The DM6 is very stable, but has no slow motion controls and I really miss them. Yes, I know that the vendors and some users say "you don't need it with a mount this smooth", but I beg to differ. First of all, if I loosen the dampening on the DM6 to the point where the scope moves far more smoothly, then changing EP's is a big problem as the scope won't begin to hold its position. If I tighten it up to the point where it will hold the position, then moving the scope at high powers is not as smooth as I would like. The truth is I far prefer the Teegul's slow-motion controls - especially since you can crank up the tension to the point where changing from a heavy Nagerl EP to a light EP causes no difficulty, without compromising the slow motion controls in any way. If the DM6 had a quick clutch to clamp the mount while changing EP's I would probably feel very different about this scope, but it doesn't.

The DM6 is a fine mount, but I still intend to put my NP-127 on the Teegul/Gitzo combination just to see what the dampening times look like. It would not entirely surprise me if I found it acceptable - more later - when I have a chance to test this out - although I'm worried that stability could be an issue with a tripod/mount that weigh substantially less than the OTA (this combo weighing about a 1/3 of the DM6 on a tripod).

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