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5.5: Telescope Mounts

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    CC BY 2. 5 | Image courtesy of Wikimedia Author: Marie-Lan Nguyen.

    Telescope Mount is the telescope’s support structure. The two main types of telescope mounts are alt-azimuth and equatorial mounts. The Alt-azimuth mounts move in two directions: left to right, or up and down. The word “alt-azimuth” is a combination of altitude and azimuth. Equatorial mounts track the apparent motion of the stars by aligning one of its axes parallel to Earth’s axis.

    Go-To Telescope Mounts

    Go-To’s telescope mounts enable the telescope to find objects in the sky using a microprocessor, encoders and motors. A Global Positioning System (GPS) as a part of the Go-To system tells the mount and microprocessor where the telescope is located, what objects are visible, and where they are in the sky.

    This page titled 5.5: Telescope Mounts was last modified on Wed, 23 Jul 2025 01:22:47 GMT and is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Lumen Learning via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.