The instruments provided for the journey consisted of two barometers, two thermometers, two compasses, a sextant, two chronometers, an artificial horizon, and an
altazimuth, to throw out the height of distant and inaccessible objects.
Software Bisque, the world's foremost manufacturer of equatorial telescope mounts for remote/robotic astronomy, has announced its first foray into building
altazimuth mounts (and modifying its storied TheSkyX software to control them).
This edition has a new chapter on exoplanets; new coverage of the
altazimuth coordinate system; revised coverage of planet classification; expanded coverage of the satellites of the planets; and scientific updates related to physics and astronomy, including the discovery of the Higgs boson, indications of water activity on Mars, observations of fragmentation of an asteroid and rings around another one, the meeting of the Rosetta spacecraft with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the discovery of new exoplanets, the sunspot cycle, the improved parallax measurements by Gaia and the Hubble Space Telescope, and new properties of the solar wind.
Mounts come in two basic types:
altazimuth and equatorial.
The simple Newtonian reflector optical design, red-dot finderscope, and
altazimuth mount on full-height stainless-steel tripod make it easy to navigate the night sky.
The Museum contains several pre-construction models of telescopes--the SALT (Southern African Large Tel escope), the 74-inch (1.9m), the 40-inch (1m) and a 3.5m
altazimuth telescope similar to the ESO New Technology Telescope that was proposed for Sutherland before the SALT project came along.
The 30-inch is a permanently mounted
altazimuth telescope of 3 tons moving weight, turning on a base ring 10 feet (3m) in dia-meter--the azimuth 'bearing'--itself bedded on a foundation of 7 tons of high-specification reinforced concrete.
The trend among modern telescopes, including the NTT, is to use an
altazimuth mount, in which one rotation axis is horizontal, the other vertical.
iOptron AZ Mount Pro
Altazimuth Mount with 2-inch Tripod
Ainslie mounted the new mirror in a square mahogany tube, half an inch thick and with an internal diameter of 10 inches (he would have preferred 101/2 inches in hindsight), atop an
altazimuth stand that he had previously used for his 61/2-inch (165mm) Calver.