Hi friends,

After a lot of research and reading most of the views and opinions in this forum, now i have purchased Orion Apex127 MAK. Since it is purchased as OTA, now i am looking for a suitable tripod. Here i am very confused as to which one to buy. Orion in its website sugests its tripod Paragon HD plus.

Please help.

If you're just doing terrestrial stuff, then any heavy duty video tripod should support it. However, if you want to use it for astronomy, you want an equatorial mount or astronomy-specific altazimuth mount. How come you didn't buy a mount/telescope package? That would have been cheaper.

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The Apex127 is a good choice of scope... and do not think its just for beginners. I have available to me a 1.2 metre reflector in a modern observatory. We often use the smaller lighter scopes for zooming about the night sky. The best scope is the one you use most often... As for the tripod. If you want it to be portable do not sacrifice stability for light weight. Heavy is best. There are NO exceptions. Rigidity is your friend. A wobbly scope is useless.
,

Bought a Takahashi scope, stunning. Looked around for a support to match.
Bought a Manfrotto video tripod with pan and tilt head, never looked back.
Can follow any star I want with just a finger touch.
Nokton

I just purchased a used Orion Skyview Pro from a good friend of mine, who was upgrading to a heavier mount for his dual telescope/camera setup .

The tripod is a bit older, and only has manual setting circles, and a clock drive with 4 different slewing rates for both axis, but it is a rock solid mount, and once you aim the scope at something, it STAYS PUT on that object !

There are "Goto" mod kits for that line of tripods, but they are a bit pricey, and I prefer just to use sky maps and "star hopping" to find my way around the sky. I believe that one is a better amateur astronomer if he doesn't rely on a computer to steer him around the stars !

It is extremely nice to have a motorized mount that will stay fixed on an object for as long as you desire to look at it !

JMHO Jim

If astronomy is all you are going to use the telescope for, an EQ-3 would probably be perfect.

http://www.telescope.com/control/pro...oduct_id=09822

I have a 6 inch Newtonian on one and it plenty stable. I would not go any smaller than the EQ-3 though. The EQ-2 is quite a bit less stable.

Also with the tracking motor the EQ-3 can be pretty decent for planetary photography if you are interested in that, deep sky photography not so much though.

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