Berlebach Report 723 Tripod - First & Second Impressions

AdeKing · February 14, 2021

I've recently received a new-to-me Berlebach Report 723 tripod from @Telescope40.

Whilst I do have an ED100, ED120, 102 f/11 and 80mm f/15, when I sat down and thought about things I realised that the majority of my observing tends to be grab and go with either my Lunt LS60, William Optics ZS70 or my humble Skywatcher ST102 which I actually think punches well above its weight.

Up until now, I've used fairly heavyweight Manfrotto photo tripods for grab and go, these being a Manfrotto 058B or a Manfrotto 028B, the issue with these two is that whilst they are pretty stable they are also quite heavy and reasonably tall even when fully collapsed at 6.7kg and 95cm tall for the Manfrotto 058B and 4.1kg and 82cm tall for the Manfrotto 028B.

They work pretty well for grab and go, but as we only have a small car, this presented a bit of an issue when we were able to travel and will continue to do so if we are ever allowed to travel again.

Now, I absolutely love Berlebach tripods and already have a Uni 18 which my iOptron AZ Pro sits on and I've been looking at the Report series for a while since reading the following thread, but the Report 312 was a bit big for my needs in this case.

I wanted a small tripod that collapsed down to about 60cm and was able to extend to put a telescope eyepiece at about 1.20m so that it could comfortably be used from a garden chair or dining room chair when we go away. The tripod would be used to mount an AZ GTi or SolarQuest which are my travel mounts and the largest scope used would be a ST102, but more normally would need to support a Lunt LS60DS or William Optics ZS70.

Enter the Berlebach Report 723, this little tripod weighs in at just 2.2kg, measures 55cm fully collapsed, 90cm with the legs extended but the centre column at its lowest and 1.30m with the centre column fully extended. The tripod also has a payload of approx 12kg so seemed to fit my needs well.

I also got a couple of useful addition with this tripod which were an extension arm and a tiny tray which is just about large enough for a mug of coffee and my astro notebook. I have a suspicion that the little tray I have might have been discontinued as the closest I can find in their product brochure is the projector tray though the tray I have is much smaller, measuring just 20cm x 16cm.

The extension arm and tray fit into holes drilled through the side of the centre column at the top and bottom, and the extension can be stored inside of the centre column when not in use, in order to do that you need to forego the handy hook attachment at the bottom of the centre column.

I've had the opportunity to use this setup on about three occasions so far, twice solar observing and once at night.

I have to say, I've been pleasantly surprised so far, the little Report 723 seems to have ticked all of the boxes, it copes happily with all of the scopes I've used on it at the moment and vibrations dampen within about half a second to a second after focusing.

I haven't really tried to use high magnifications as my grab and go setups tend to be used for wide field views, the moon hasn't really been around at social hour and Mars is too small and now requires magnification that results in too small an exit pupil for me to have a chance of comfortably seeing any details with these little refractors.

Now I just need to find myself a nice tripod bag to store the little report in.

I'll update when I've had a bit more sky time, but here are some photos of the setup described above.

Ade