instruction Manual Orion® EQ-2 Equatorial Mount #9828 Equatorial Mount Customer Support (800) 676-1343 E-mail: support@telescope.com Corporate Offices (831) 763-7000 Providing Exceptional Consumer Optical Products Since 1975 89 Hangar Way, Watsonville, CA 95076 IN 168 Rev.
Dec. setting circle R.A. setting circle Latitude lock t-bolt Counterweight Latitude adjustment t-bolt Counterweight lock knob Dec. slow-motion control cable Counterweight shaft Azimuth lock knob R.A. slow-motion control cable Accessory tray Accessory tray bracket Accessory tray bracket attachment point Leg lock knob Figure 1. EQ-2 Mount Congratulations on your purchase of a quality Orion product. Your new EQ-2 Equatorial Mount was designed to work with many different telescope optical tubes.
Table of Contents 1. Unpacking.............................................................................................................................. 3 2. Assembly............................................................................................................................... 3 3. Attaching a Telescope............................................................................................................ 4 4. Balancing a Telescope.....................................................
8. Slide the counterweight onto the counterweight shaft. Make sure the counterweight lock knob is adequately loosened to allow the counterweight shaft to pass through the hole in the counterweight. 9. Now, with the counterweight lock knob still loose, grip the counterweight with one hand and thread the shaft into the equatorial mount (at the base of the declination axis) with the other hand.
3a 3c 3b 3d 5. Loosen the tube ring clamps a few turns until you can slide the telescope tube forward and back inside the rings (this can be aided by using a slight twisting motion on the optical tube while you push or pull on it). Position the telescope so that it remains horizontal when you carefully let go with both hands. This is the balance point for the Dec. axis (Figure 3d). Before clamping the rings tight again, rotate the telescope so that the eyepiece is at a convenient angle for viewing.
Little Dipper (in Ursa Minor) Big Dipper (in Ursa Major) N.C.P. Polaris s ter Star in Po Cassiopeia Figure 4: To find Polaris in the night sky, look north and find the Big Dipper. Extend an imaginary line from the two “Pointer Stars” in the bowl of the Big Dipper. Go about five times the distance between those stars and you’ll reach Polaris, which lies within 1° of the north celestial pole (NCP). Loosen the Dec. lock knob and rotate the telescope optical tube until it is parallel with the R.A. axis.
That’s 5 hours and 35.4 minutes in right ascension, and -5 degrees and 27 arc-minutes in declination (there are 60 arcminutes in 1 degree of declination). Before you can use the setting circles to locate objects, the mount must be well polar aligned, and the R.A. setting circle must be calibrated. The Dec. setting circle has been permanently calibrated at the factory, and should read 90° whenever the telescope optical tube is parallel with the R.A. axis. Calibrating the Right Ascension Setting Circle 1.
To point the telescope to the east or west, or in other directions, you rotate the telescope on its R.A. and Dec. axes. Depending on the altitude of the object you want to observe, the counterweight shaft will be oriented somewhere between vertical and horizontal. 6a 6b Figure 6 illustrates how the telescope will look pointed at the four cardinal directions - north, south, east, and west The key things to remember when pointing the telescope is that a) you only move it in R.A. and Dec.
