What is a fork mount?
The fork mount is an altazimuth or equatorial mount in which the telescope tube is held between the “prongs” of a two-pronged fork. The axis about which the telescope rotates is the altitude or declination axis. The fork itself rotates about the azimuth or polar axis. It is mostly used in its altazimuth form for refractors and in its equatorial form for Cassegrain-type catadioptrics. The Dobsonian mount can be considered to be a variation of an altazimuth fork. Fork mounts are usually the most compact way of mounting a telescope, but the base of the fork can limit the position of the observer’s head.
