hi this is Graham from Jenham''s Astro this video covers the unboxing of an HEQ5 Pro telescope mount by skywatcher now this mount's been around for a few
years and I've used one in a garden observatory setup
it's a popular choice for astronomers wanting the convenience of a go to mount
offers good stability while also being reasonable portable.
The package arrives in two boxes. One containing the mount and one the tripod so let's take a look.
Let's open up the big box
So there's a box inside the box.
It contains the tripod
It's nicely packaged in foam to protect either end of it
The tripod itself weighs around 5 kilos.
It's quite rigid and has the 1.75 inch diameter steel legs
There's also a spreader bar so that's going to attach into the middle of the tripod to
allow the legs to brace securely and for us to tighten the whole assembly up
and there's also the box quite heavy this one about as heavy as the tripod
which is a clue to what's inside nicely wrapped in in foam we've got a
counterweight so we'll see that later when we assemble the mount. So taking a
look at the spacer bar a little closer it attaches obviously bracing gates the
legs and you can tighten it with this knob underneath it's worth knowing that
there's a single bolt is basically going all the way up through the center of the
tripod head so if I tilt this over open I can see that this thread the idea is
that you'll you're screwed the bolt and use it to attach the bottom of the
tripod head on to the tripod itself and then tighten the spacer bar up other
things to note is there's an alignment pin to locate the orientation of the mount
head and there's an identification at that leg is basically going to be
pointed towards north obviously this is an equatorial mount so what about the
second box well
okay so first off we have a set of instructions for this mount
It's a manual covering the HEQ5 and EQ6 mounts
We've got an attachment strap here, we'll see the purpose of that later.
main content inside we've got the mount head itself
We've got the remote control handset
And we've got cables for the handset and power.
A rather nice dovetail bar.
recently skywatcher with a small change to mount they further they've coloured this
green and there's some other green parts on the side of the man which I think
makes it look quite smart other than that we've just got a couple of
adjustment bolts and we'll see the function of those later.
if we remove the amount head out of polystyrene
first thing you notice other than the fact it's it's several kilos of Mount is
that it's free to rotate so it's shipped in a position that's 180 degrees from its
normal use so you can rotate this part and you can see here there are there we
go there's a clamp to allow us to to stop that rotation
quick look you can see this is where we're going to attach the mount head to
the to the tripod here if I release this clamp we can see that the counterweight
is going to attach here on this counterweight bar that it ships in a nicely retracted
position we can also see that there is a bubble level here at the bottom of the
mount and that the declination axis has another clamp and the dovetail is gonna
be secured by two bolts looking at the connections we can see there is a
connection for a hand controller supply the 28 Volt the 12 volt term sorry DC
power on/off switch and autoguider connection so continuing with the
assembly we take the mount head and we locate it on to that pin saw previously
on top of the tripod and then whilst holding onto the to the head slowly
screw the thread of the attachment bolt from underneath until you can feel the
locating inside and keep screwing it all the way to the top tighten it up
then turning to the spreader bar
attach that and a large plastic knob tie it all
together and then we do attach the counterweights okay so just to finish
off the other bits and pieces got in the box
we saw we've got a plastic bracket here to hold the hand controller and we can
attach that with a velcro strap around one of the legs like so. The hand controller
itself which comes with a cable which you can click into the like so into the
bottom of the hand controller and then a similar connector the other end which
goes into the mount like so and then you can put the controller onto the bracket
and then finally we have a 12V DC power cable which will attach into mount like
so and it comes with a cigar lighter type fitting to attach to a power supply
so now threaded in the two bolts that came with the mount so one here into the
back of mount and another one here on the front and basically the purpose of
these two bolts is to allow us to adjust the angle of the polar axis of the mount
so they act in a in a kind of push-pull arrangement so if I loosen off this bolt
here and then turn this one you can see hopefully that the angle of the mount is
increasing like so and then if I tighten the other one then and loosen this one
then we can reduce the angle of the mount and eventually once you've got the
polar axis to the mouth pointed towards the North celestial pole or the South
celestial Pole then you can lock these two bolts together to hold them out
securely so that's it skywatcher HEQ5 pro mount unboxed hope
this video has been useful please subscribe to my Jenham's Astro YouTube
channel if you'd like to see more astro videos and thanks for watching