 Over the summer, Highpoint Scientific, a great telescope store, kindly lent me the Skywatcher EQM35 Pro mount. And I mainly wanted the mount for a video idea I had called Astrophotography from $100 to $10,000. And I released that video in July, and for that video, the EQM35 worked out beautifully. I've since returned the mount to Highpoint, but I wanted to give my thoughts in a quick mini-review. Now, the reason this isn't a full review is, for full reviews, what I really like doing is comparisons, with lots of image samples compared to other similar products, sort of at the right price range and capabilities. And that's what I do with my filter and lens shootouts. Unfortunately, it's harder to get my hands on a bunch of similarly specced mounts at the same time, as these are more expensive and critically large items that are hard to store compared to, like, filters and lenses. But I can tell you, if I was going to compare the EQM35 to other mounts, the top ones I'd consider are the Celestron AVX, the Skywatcher HEQ5, and the iOptron SEM26. These are three smaller go-to equatorial mounts in this sort of middle ground in terms of price, which is this $700 to $1200 range. And I can say generally when it comes to mounts, I have found the adage you get what you pay for is pretty much true, but keep in mind, when I say that, that the most expensive mount I've ever owned is my Skywatcher EQ6R, which is around $1700 today, and mounts go way up from there. So I don't have any experience with really high-end mounts. Anyways, onto the EQM35. It's said to be a sort of combination of different mounts that Skywatcher had previously made and then had put into a package that was designed for astrophotography in a lot of different ways. So it has the more accurate 182th worm gear, the electronics, and the heavy tripod of their EQ5 Pro mount, but the size of the mount head is more similar to the Skywatcher EQ3-2. And Skywatcher currently sells the EQM35 for $785 USD. It comes with the mount head, of course. The control panel, which conveniently has a full-size Type-B USB plug for computer connection. A spare Vixen Dovetail, a SINSCAN hand controller, two 7.5 lb counterweights, and a 2-inch steel tripod. And I was actually pretty surprised by the tripod. It's just as beefy as the one that came with my EQ6R, but the EQM35 has a much smaller mount head. But I'm not going to complain about that because a sturdy tripod is essential for deep-sky imaging. There is a little bit of assembly required when you first get the mount, but nothing too bad that includes tools and good instructions. Unfortunately, my copy had the declination clutch put on wrong, so it interfered with operation of the mount when slowing away from home position. And I had to actually unscrew that clutch and reseat the clutch knob for the mount to work properly. And I sort of expect stuff like that with these mass-produced cheaper mounts, but it's a weird conundrum because you need experience in the hobby to recognize what is wrong with something. But the experienced people typically will buy more and more expensive mounts, while naturally people just getting started in the hobby will buy these cheaper mounts. So my advice there is before you return some new mount you got that isn't working for some reason, try to connect with a local astronomy club and see if anyone local can help you out. Because sometimes these local mentors and, you know, there are more experienced set of eyes can often identify and fix a problem really quick. That declination clutch thing was actually really simple once I figured out what was wrong. My biggest takeaway from using this mount on a few different occasions this summer is that the tracking accuracy was really impressive. I tried it with up to 12 pounds of gear on it, 430 millimeter focal length with a DSLR, so that gives me an image scale of about 2 arc seconds per pixel. And I had no problem with unguided subs, they were mostly all keepers at 30 seconds, at 60 seconds, they even tried 90 seconds. So tracking was no issue. What I did have an issue with was the pointing accuracy. And this is when you issue a go to command, how accurately does it go to the thing that you're trying to find? And you build what's called a pointing model in the controller by doing the three star alignment. So that's where you find bright stars, you center them on your DSLR screen. And after you build that pointing model, when you issue a go to command, it's supposed to put you into the right place. Well, I found just like with my ioptron smart EQ mount, you couldn't really rely on the go to even after a three star alignment. It would be often full degrees away from where it should be, especially if I was moving very far in the sky. And so I'm sure the question I'll get is could this just be a problem with my copy of the mount? Well, I don't think so because this seems to plague a lot of low cost mounts. As I mentioned, it plagues my smart EQ by ioptron. And I've also confirmed with others who've used the EQM 35 that the pointing accuracy doesn't seem to be very good. So is this a deal breaker? Well, if you're buying this mount for go to and you plan to use the system with just the hand controller, then yeah, I wouldn't recommend the mount. However, the real reason this mount is a bargain, it just $785 is that it comes with that USB connection. And from there, you can hook it up to a computer. And so I use like a Windows laptop with EQ mod to control the mount. But you can also get these Raspberry Pi devices that are popular like the ASI air or a stellar mate and control it that way. And as soon as you're controlling it from a computer, you can then use plate solving, which is where your camera takes a picture of the sky, wherever it's pointed, looks at the star patterns to figure out where it's pointed and then sends a command back to the mount for which direction to move. And it does all of this automatically. You can take however many tries it needs until you're pointed exactly where you want to be pointed. So it's like souped up go to and plate solving is like magic once you get it working. It works so well. So as long as you're willing to use a computer of some kind, whether it's a Windows laptop or Linux based Raspberry Pi, well, then I can definitely recommend this mount if you're using a light telescope setup or a telephoto lens. In my opinion, this mount is perfect for those kinds of optics. So if you're using a telephoto lens, a wide field refractor and you're under the payload limit, which is 22 pounds or 10 kilograms, it's going to be great. I used it primarily with an Apertura 72 millimeter refractor with a field flander and a DSLR. And that was a great setup for this mount. You could easily you have plenty of weight limit left to add auto guiding and a computer and plate solving right onto the mount and have tons of fun with it. I think that would bring you years into the hobby before you run into objects. Well, I hope this mini review helps someone out there who is going to be looking at this mount and maybe someday when I have more space, I can really do full on mount shootouts, which would be fun. Till next time, this was a five minute Friday with me, Nico Carver, also known as Nebula Photos. Clear skies.