This paper addresses the application of an active magnetic bearing (AMB) system to levitate the elevation axis of an electro-optical sight mounted on a moving vehicle. In this type of system, it is desirable to retain the elevation axis in an air-gap between magnetic bearing stators while the vehicle is moving. To eliminate disturbance responses, a disturbance observer based sliding mode control is developed. This control can decouple disturbance observation dynamics from sliding mode dynamics and preserves the robustness of the sliding control. The sliding surfaces are designed in the consideration of scattering of received image. The proposed control is applied to a 2-DOF active magnetic bearing system subject to base motion. Along with experimental results, the feasibility of the proposed technique is illustrated.