72 AUSTRALIAN SKY & TELESCOPE April 2018
ASTRONOMER’S WORKBENCH by Jerry OltionBinocular mounts that work
A steady hand can gain you a couple of magnitudes.
SHORT OF JUST STANDING outside
and looking up, binoculars offer one
of the easiest ways to observe the sky.
Yet they also present one of the most
difficult problems: holding them steady
while you’re doing your observing!
That has led to a myriad of different
strategies to stabilise them. Randy
Strauss has tried plenty, and he’s come
up with some interesting variations on
his own.
Randy describes himself as “a fair
weather, novice observer who, when
conditions are pleasant, studies a star
chart, selects a target, sets up my gear,
and is pleasantly surprised when I
actually find what I’m looking for”.
Binoculars are perfectly suited for this
type of observing, but he soon noticed
how tired his arms would get. That led
him to build a mount, but he quickly
realised that not all mounts are good for
all things. Some are best for scanning
and finding; others are better suited for
deep study of a single object.
Randy uses standing mounts to scan
the sky, then he moves to a “tripod on
a tripod” or the shoulder or sawhorse
mounts when he settles on an object hewants to look at for a while. The result:
“No more arm fatigue, no more neck
cramps. When you need to rest your
eyes, you just close them and relax.
Seeing through the binoculars while
lying on your back and with no more
vibration than from your heartbeat, not
using your arms at all, is the way to go.”
Several of his mounts are shown
here, and because a picture is worth a
thousand words, I’m going to let them
speak for themselves.■ Contributing Editor JERRY OLTION
uses binoculars ranging from 7×25 to
300×317. The latter won’t fit on a tripod,
but fortunately they don’t need one.T 1. Perhaps the simplest of them all:
a lounge chair under a sawhorse. The
binoculars attach to a tripod head that in turn
is secured to the sawhorse. 2. To observe
standing up, a tripod strapped to another
tripod holds a pair of 25×100s. For another,
a tripod attached to a length of PVC pipe is
slipped over an umbrella stand. It rotates 360°
and is high enough to prevent neck pains.- Made from aluminium crutches, this mount
takes its inspiration from shoulder-mounted
anti-aircraft guns. The binoculars are placed
so the eyepieces perfectly reach the eyes
when the pads are firm against the shoulders. - For light binoculars, a padded forehead rest
is sufficient. A monopod provides a lever arm
for stability.
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