Because a balanced load lets a small motor turn something nearly weightless. An unbalanced mount tracks unevenly, shows backlash in one direction and not the other, and wears its gears on the side that carries the weight.
Balance is the step most often skipped, and the one whose absence is most often blamed on the mount.
What balance means here
Both axes. With the clutches loose, the tube should stay where it is put in declination and in right ascension, neither swinging down nor creeping. That state means the motor is moving inertia rather than weight.
What an unbalanced mount does to its gears
The drive has to lift on one side of a revolution and restrain on the other. Tracking becomes uneven, backlash appears when the direction of loading changes, and the gear faces wear unevenly.
The order to do it in
Right ascension first, by sliding the counterweight along its shaft with the tube horizontal. Then declination, by sliding the tube in its dovetail. Changing one disturbs the other slightly, so a second pass is normal.
What to balance with
Everything that will be on the telescope when you observe: the finder, the diagonal, the eyepiece you will use, the camera. Balancing a bare tube and then adding two kilograms of accessories undoes the whole exercise.
If this page and the manufacturer’s own documentation disagree, follow the documentation. Every aperture, focal length, payload rating, field, eye relief, transmission figure and thread size on this page comes from the maker’s own published figures, with the unit as printed and the source named. None of it is measured here, and no figure is converted into another convention, because a converted number is a different number. And for any payload figure: makers quote it for observing, and photography asks for a considerably wider margin. A tracking error invisible at the eyepiece is a smeared star on a sensor, and the rating usually excludes the counterweights. This page reports the maker’s figure with the use it was quoted for, and derives no photographic capacity from it.
The questions that keep arriving
Should it be perfectly balanced?
Close, with a slight deliberate imbalance being a common practice among imagers so that the gears stay loaded on one face and backlash never shows. Whether a maker recommends it is worth reading in the manual.
Do I rebalance after changing an eyepiece?
For visual use, when the change is large — a heavy wide-field eyepiece against a small one shifts the balance noticeably on a small mount. For imaging, rebalance whenever anything is added or removed.
Last reviewed 17 September 2026