Binoculars + Astronomy = Tripod

by Tony on May 27th, 2007

Yourfirsttelescope [This is part three of until-I-get-tired in a series on buying and using binoculars.]

This happens to me all the time: I see something interesting up in the sky, a bright light, an interesting planetary configuration, a comet, a thin crescent moon, the Orion Nebula, etc. and I’ll run inside and grab a pair of binoculars. As I’m holding them up, neck craned upward, my arms start getting tired and the view through the eyepieces start to shake and move all over the place.

I try to steady the binoculars by putting my elbows on my chest, and that helps for a while, but that doesn’t last long and the distance between my elbow and hands isn’t always ideal to let me see what I’m looking at. Usually therefore, I have to bend my torso backwards to keep the object in my field of view, which after a few moments, begins to hurt like hell.

My point is that looking at things up in the sky with binoculars is different from, say, bird watching, because you generally want to look at whatever-it-is for a while (longer than a few moments), you’re generally standing up, whatever-it-is is usually above you, sometimes straight up, you need to crane your neck and bend your back.

Looking at the night sky with binoculars is generally NOT very ergonomic.

That’s why if I know I’m going to be looking at something for longer than a few minutes, I get out one of my telescopes. Looking down into an eyepiece and not having to hold it steady is much more comfortable. It’s for that reason that I use my AstroScan most of the time. It’s easy to set up and I can put it on a table, or even the ground, and comfortably view the sky.

Still, binoculars do offer high quality views and there are times when people just want to use binoculars. So, I recommend getting an adapter to mount your binocs on a tripod. Any tripod will work, but you’ll need an adapter to mount them with, like the one shown at left.

They cost anywhere from $6.95 to around $30.00 or so. They will allow you to mount most binoculars onto a standard photographic tripod. Doing this will save your back and allow you to look at something for longer than just a few minutes without the field of view shaking all over the place.

Of course, like anything, you can go overboard and buy a really fancy one:

Binocularparallelogrammount
Image Credit: Universal Astronomics