Telescope Reviews: 5" APO on a Teegul Lapides mount

Well, not any 5" APO - the Televue NP-127 which has long been recognized as one of the lightest 5" APO's around. The OTA itself only weighs about 16lbs - probably up to around 20lbs with diagonal, rings and a light-weight finder.

I have had the scope and mount for over a year, but never tested this combination because I assumed it would not be really usable. But recently, I put my Celestron C-8 on this combination and found it worked remarkably well and that topped out at about 21 lbs.

So I finally tried this combination tonight, including a 60mm SV finder. Now, mind you, I have one very fine tripod underneath the Teegul mount - a Gitzo 5530. Of course the tripod and mount together barely top 12lbs, so they are lighter than even the scope (!).

So how well does it work? Well I have to say I was a bit flabbergasted. Settling time after a really hard rap on the mount was 4-5 seconds. With vibration pads underneath the legs, this dropped to 2 seconds - now this is in more than slightly acceptable territory!. I was able to focus tightly at 264x on the moon in real-time - the small amount of vibration was not enough to interfere with finding a perfect focus. I was not expecting it to be this good, especially since there's only a very small Vixen rail. I use this mount/tripod extensively with my much shorter TMB92 and TMB0105/650, but it was definitely a revelation to find it working so well with this mount.

I usually use my DM-6 with the NP-127, and sure - that's a more stable combination. But I also like slow-motion controls and the far lighter weight of this mount (less than half the DM-6 and tall tripod I have it on.

And yes, this mount and tripod are pushing some $1,300 - so this is pricey combination, but then again the NP-127 wasn't exactly an inexpensive purchase

. I had in fact tried the NP-127 last year on a Vixen PortaMount and the settling time on that was about 10 seconds - definitely into unacceptable territory.

The NP-127 is an unusually lightweight 5" APO - many scopes this size start around 20lbs. The NP-127 is not nearly as short though as its F5.2 FL might suggest, since it's a Petzval design and its main objective is probably closer to F10.