Telescope Mounts Put a wedge between an Alt-azimuth mount and its supporting tripod, and you get a Fork Equatorial Mount.  This type of equatorial mount gives you all the many benefits of an equatorial mount with the simplicity of an alt-azimuth design.  Its main drawback being it is not suitable to long focal length optical tubes. This is because the optical tube must be able to swing down through the opening between the optical tube's hinge, and the base from which the forks arise. The angle of the wedge should equal the user's latitude.  The German Equatorial Mount eliminates this problem allowing the mount to support very long focal length optical tubes. Equatorial mounts with "Clock Drives" have been in use for many decades. A simple clock motor on the polar axis allows the telescope to track an object across the sky without a second motor on the "Declination" axis, and without a computer. Even dual-motor, computer-controlled telescopes track better on properly set up equatorial mounts. Once an equatorial mount has been properly set up, the mount's "Setting Circles" can be used with any of the many star catalogues to locate thousands of catalogued stellar objects.