For those wanting to use a heavy camera on the rear port of their ETX telescope you need to be very careful of 2 things.
1 - weight of camera can break the rear port plastic housing.
2 - weight of camera makes the telescope very unbalanced and can ruin your drive gears. I’ve had to replace gears with broken teeth because of this.
It is better to use the eyepiece port if simply connecting a DSLR. This is a stronger connection and will provide more range in movement / avoid hitting the telescope base. However, I wanted to use my Meade .63 focal reducer so I needed to use the rear port. To help support the DSLR, I made a support arm connected to the bottom of the ETX using the two 1/4” - 20 threads. I had a piece of aluminum flat stock so I used that. I also connected a piece of t-track to make an easy counterweight bar for the front.
This gives me nice balance and confidence I won’t break the rear port connection. I will need to be careful of what objects I am slewing to as it adds limitations on tube movement. I can try to modify this a bit by bending the support arm for the camera to give a little more clearance if needed. Probably need to switch to a piece of steel flat stock ad I’m not sure the aluminum will bend much.
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Edited by Thrifty1, 23 January 2022 - 08:15 AM.
