Mounts

North sector

astrophotography is possible if the platform is care-

Figure 9 . 1 The
fully constructed and polar-aligned.
principle of the
An early design for an equatorial platform was docu- equatorial platform .
mented by Adrien Poncet (Poncet, 1977). It uses a pivot
point and rollers/slides on a plane to define the motion
of the platform. Alan Gee designed a platform that
used a cylindrical bearing on one end and a single
pivot on the other. This was an improvement on the
high loading of the Poncet design, but the «virtual"
polar axis was very low and the system was not per-
fectly balanced, which required more power to turn.
Georges d'Autume changed these designs by eliminat-
ing the single pivot and introduced the concept of
using conical bearings to carry more weight and also
raise the polar axis higher for better balance. Georges
d' Autume provided an excellent review of all these
designs back in 1988 (D'Autume, 1988). Platforms
based on this conical bearing design work well, but it is
not straightforward to fabricate conical bearings! There
had to be a better way!
One of the advantages of building a Dob is that it
only requires average building skills and only basic,
hand-held power tools. The platform, to be compatible
with the idea of a Dob, must keep to that same philo-
sophy. That is what prompted changing the conical
bearing design to use cylindrical bearing surfaces for
the north and south bearing surfaces, similar to the
north end of the Gee design. Before we go further, let
us review how a platform works.
Equatorial Platforms 13

to its beginning of travel or a way to lift the sector off

the drive rollers to move it back to the starting point.
Just skidding the sector across the roller will work, but
you run the risk of damaging the roller surface. Balance
is also more critical, since friction is the only thing
keeping the sector from slipping on the roller.
However, a system like this can work really well and
consistently allow 15 to 30 s unguided images with a
CCD camera at prime focus, and much longer expo-
sures if guided (in RA) .
Slightly less sophisticated, but easier to build and
very forgiving of errors in balance, is a tangent arm
drive. This option has a drive screw that has a carriage
(nut) on it, which grabs a tangent arm attached to the
platform. The linear motion of the carriage along the
drive screw is turned into rotational motion. The car-
riage has a tang attached to it that grabs the tangent
arm. The tang has a vertical slot to allow for the motion
of the tangent arm. This design is only perfectly accu-
rate near the mid-travel point of the platform, when
the drive screw carriage is actually tangent to the arc
the tangent arm describes. However, the tracking in-
accuracies due to this "tangent error" are actually very
small, owing to the large diameter of the sectors
involved. All these extra pieces each introduce a bit of
play into the drive system, which can add up and hurt
tracking accuracy. In addition, imperfections in the
drive screw and carriage can cause periodic errors.
However, for visual work, including using high power,
the accuracy is more than adequate, and you may find
you simply do not need anything more sophisticated.
For piggyback photography this approach is also just
fine, since these tiny errors do not show up in the
larger scale images. For unguided prime-focus photo-
graphy, the combination of mechanical play of all the
pieces and periodic error from the drive screw usually
limits exposures to about 15 s (which is still OK for
CCD imaging where many short exposures can be
stacked). For any long-duration photography, with a
platform or any other type mount, you really need to
guide the tracking (either manually or automatically)
to obtain consistent quality in exposures.
Another way to attach a drive screw to the tangent
arm is by a wire or chain bent around a "sector"
instead of just a single tangent arm pin. This provides
an increase in accuracy at very little additional com-
plexity, even though periodic errors associated with the
drive screw are still present. The biggest problem is