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Heavy duty mount for astrophotography

Equatorial Mount Equipment Remote Astrophotography Buying Advice
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Peter Horstink avatar
Peter Horstink avatar

Hi everybody,

For the last few years we have been using a JTW Trident mount for our astrophotography. We have recently upgraded the mount to a GTR, the latest version of the Trident. The mount has been awesome so far. It has been operating remotely without a glitch.

Production time has been a bit of a negative for these mounts, but that seems to have been solved now, with much shorter wait times.

I noticed on the JTW website that they are having a sale, especially interesting for US customers. If you are in the market for a new mount, you should really check it out.

https://www.jtwastronomy.com/products/trident-gtr-v2-preorder

Clear skies,

Peter

Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar

That’s a beautiful mount for the price. Do you find that you are getting the same tracking accuracy in real life?

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Peter Horstink avatar
Peter Horstink avatar

Hi,

Yes absolutely. It does take some careful balancing though, which is probably one of the “negatives” of a friction drive. Ours carries a C9.25 and a WO FLT132 in tandem. Quite the load when you include the cameras filter wheels focusers etc. So we did take our time to properly balance it. But now it runs very good. The drive pin still creates a bit of a periodic error, ours is about ± 2” and that is easily guided out. On a night with good seeing we guide at about 0.3” rms, and with bad seeing it goes up a bit to 0.5 to 0.6”. There are users who fine tune it to even less, but for our purposes, this out of the box performance is all we need. Onstep offers possibilities to model the mount to make it even more accurate, pointing and tracking. The newer mounts can now als record the PE and some users use it unguided after that.

For us the customer support has been really good as well. Mark from JTW is always there to help, even though sometimes you have to wait a while before he replies. The discord group is probably the easiest for that too. If you have any more questions, let me know.

Cheers,

Peter

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Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar

Thank you Peter, very informative. I can certainly see something like this as my forever mount. There are others but impossible for me to imagine ever affording.

Grigory2020 avatar
Grigory2020 avatar

If you think about a new mount, think about a mount with both axis encoders. Another feature is direct drive mounts. I have a PlaneWave L-350, and it tracks my scope with a 2563mm focal length without any guiding. It has encoders, and it is a direct drive mount. I can do 10-minute subs with excellent pinpoint stars without any guiding. This is absolutely great! Another thing about that mount is that I do not need meridian flips, because it’s an L-shape design. Yes, it is expensive, but I can tell you when it works, it is very, very good. Another thing, big mounts are stationary, it is not a portable mount for sure.

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Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar

I’m pretty stationary myself these days ;)

Ashraf AbuSara avatar
Ashraf AbuSara avatar

I always had great interest in this mount. But I never managed to be able to get real life data. Can you share a PHD2 guide log of a decent night with this mount?

andrea tasselli avatar
andrea tasselli avatar
Ashraf AbuSara:
I always had great interest in this mount. But I never managed to be able to get real life data. Can you share a PHD2 guide log of a decent night with this mount?

(6) Discord | #guiding | JTW Astrolounge
(6) Discord | #guiding | JTW Astrolounge
Ashraf AbuSara avatar
Ashraf AbuSara avatar

andrea tasselli · Oct 24, 2025, 04:17 PM

JTW Astrolounge

I can’t open that link. Do you have a link to join that server?

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andrea tasselli avatar
andrea tasselli avatar
https://discord.gg/jtJ8nzyd
Ashraf AbuSara avatar
Ashraf AbuSara avatar

andrea tasselli · Oct 24, 2025, 09:10 PM

https://discord.gg/jtJ8nzyd

Thanks for the link.

Search function not turning up any good logs.

andrea tasselli avatar
andrea tasselli avatar
There are quite a few @ #guiding
Ashraf AbuSara avatar
Ashraf AbuSara avatar

The ones I found so far are…. not great. I’d imagine most of these are troubleshooting performance.

andrea tasselli avatar
andrea tasselli avatar
I have seen in the main discord forum several which are pretty good and of actual performance not testing and such but you have to do a lot of trawling to find them.