I bought the Horizon tripod as a light weight ‘grab and go’ mount to go with my Megrez72. Typical retail is about £80. I have a Skytee 2 heavy duty alt-az which is brilliant for visual – it can carry two very heavy scopes, is simple to set up and take down, BUT it is heavy and not something I want to carry for more than a few hundred yards. So being without a garden at present and having to walk to my local park for the best views, I was looking for something really lightweight and able to carry up to 3.5 kg, which is about the weight of the Megrez72 plus two inch diagonal and Baader Hyperion eyepiece.

When it arrived I was surprised how robust and pleasingly chunky it felt – not your normal camera tripod at all. Testing in the garage looked promising, the legs extend the tripod head to around the height of my chin (I am 5’ 8”) and the central column can be wound up with a winding handle to well above the top of my head. The altitude and azimuth axes each have a knob to adjust the tension and a separate knob to lock the axes. The adaptor fits to the scope via a standard camera bolt and then attaches to the tripod head’s shoe by ‘slotting in’ then securing in place with a lever. Much better than other tripod fittings I have seen and completely secure.

The pan/tilt handle can be removed and reset to various angles and adjusting the handle to one side means the scope can point directly at the zenith without the handle hitting the tripod.

I finally got the opportunity to use the tripod for an observing session. Using the Megrez 72 with a 10mm eyepiece gave a magnification of 43x. The tripod was more than capable of dealing with this and gave excellent steady views of a varkiety of clusters. The scope was easy to pan and tilt, but the higher I got to the zenith the more difficult it became to point the scope. The primary reason being that the centre of gravity of the scope sits several inches above the fulcrum of the tripod head. Fine when the scope is pointing low to the horizon and the scope is directly over the fulcrum, but increasingly problematic as you look at objects at higher angle of elevation, creating increasing leverage on the fulcrum and requiring the tension and locking nut to be wound on tight to prevent slippage. Beyond a certain angle of elevation the only way I could get the red dot finder to settle in the object was to ‘go beyond’ the object using the pan/tilt handle, tighten the altitude nut, release the pan/tilt handle and then let the red dot settle into place on the object. This required some trial and error and was a pain when viewing overhead. At anything over 50x magnification I think this would be almost impossible. Next time I would plan my session to exclude any objects higher than around 60 – 70 degrees elevation.

However I found a brilliant website which describes a cheap and easy modification which removes this problem. I shall definitely be trying this.

A big plus was that extending and locking central column allowed the eyepiece to be at eye level when pointing at the zenith and without much loss of stability. This means no bending down to reach the eyepiece or having to carry an observing chair. This is a big plus over other more expensive mounts in my opinion.

So in summary this is a very good grab and go mount, well worth the £80. Best for lightweight, compact scopes at low powers up to around 40x and best used well away from the zenith. I think the tripod can handle well in excess of 40x magnification in terms of steadiness, possibly up to 100x, the issue is the pointing accurcacy using the pan and tilt when getting closer to the zenith.

But with the modification described, this could be the perfect budget grab and go mount!