Counter balancing my scope with weights??

[John MK]

Hello everyone,

Just needing some advice on counter balancing my scope when I have my camera attached. I'm still new to this and I don't want to break or damage the scope or my mount! I have a 114mm Meade scope with a eq3 pro mount. 

There's two parts to this as I'd like to make sure I do the right process as polar aligning and and doing star alignments with the mount takes a while for me (At the moment)!

1. So, what I'm doing is attaching my camera to scope with the necessary attachments and it's all fine until I try and get the scope to track or align ... the motor can't handle the weight as its out of balance and so I moved the scope to balance itself out and works fine but it can't track without having to do a meridian flip (now I don't know how to do that yet and I hope I'm right with the name of the flip) and was wondering if there's a way to counter balance the scope by attaching a weight to the end of the scope to counter balance the camera?

2. When I do align my scope what's the best way to attach my camera? I think it's best I align with my camera attached but it takes along time to get it all "aligned" ... even then without a counter weight it just doesn't track very well, the object slowly moves to out of shot due to the weight  of the camera ... I don't have a finders scope just a red dot, would the finders scope help me with aligning as I have to constantly switch the camera to the setting where I can see what I can see through the scope when the camera is attached but again it knocks it out of alignment!

Any help would be appreciated. It gets a little frustrating for me as newbie.

 

Thanks

John

[david_taurus83]

Hi John, welcome to the SGL!

 

Ideally you would have everything attached and balanced  prior to polar aligning and doing your star alignment. The video below is a good example of balancing and I would recommend watching all his videos. Dion in the video has a large reflector but the principal is the same for your scope.

 

 

[david_taurus83]

Also, you can if needed add some weight to the end of your scope to counter the camera. I followed others advice and added a 1kg ankle/wrist weight to the end of my scope and it's balanced well now.