![]() ![]() There’s an accessory tray that snaps into place in the middle of the tripod legs placing something heavy on the tray to lower the center of gravity of the telescope will help to reduce unwanted vibrations. The Aurora 114’s mount is attached to a steel-legged tripod, which is reasonably steady, though the scope can be a little jiggly at high magnifications with the legs extended all the way. The cables have some backlash but work reasonably well. Both the altitude and azimuth axes of the Aurora 114’s mount have slow-motion gearing and cables for fine adjustments for aiming and tracking objects with the telescope. There’s a lock/tension adjustment on the altitude axis that you’ll wind up using a lot, as the Aurora mount design has the optical tube outboard of the center of rotation, and thus it will not stay in place if aimed high in the sky without locking up the altitude motions. The optical tube and rings slide into its Vixen-style dovetail saddle, and the scope pivots up and down as well as left to right. The Explore One Aurora 114 uses an alt-azimuth mount and tripod with many similarities to a photo tripod. As a result, aiming the Aurora 114 with precision can be somewhat difficult. The finder provided with the Aurora 114 is an extremely low-quality red-dot sight with a tinted window, a tiny switch, and a lot of difficulty making fine adjustments. We would consider the 26mm acceptable enough the 9.7mm is noticeably a less-than-stellar experience compared to a more expensive and high-quality eyepiece. There are certainly worse eyepieces, but these aren’t fabulous ones either. The 9.7mm is also rather short on eye relief, forcing you to jam your eye into it to take in the full (albeit narrow) field of view. The apparent field of view of both is a bit less than 50 degrees, and they suffer from glare and ghost images. While the Plossl design is capable of providing sharp images, these eyepieces are unusually cheap (though thankfully the optics are still glass). The Explore One Aurora 114mm Reflector includes two 1.25” Plossl eyepieces: a 26mm providing 20x magnification and a 9.7mm for 52x. They’re bolted to a Vixen-style dovetail plate, which is interchangeable quickly and easily with almost any other astronomical mount you would want to use the Aurora 114 on. To attach to its mount, the Aurora 114 uses a pair of standard tube rings, which allow you to slide and rotate the tube for balance. There is a little bit of wobble and backlash, but it works fine at all but the highest magnifications. The focuser on the Aurora is a plastic 1.25” rack-and-pinion design. ![]()
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