Well, today I realised why my polar alignment was always out, I couldn't track anything for more than 30 seconds without getting some form of star trails.
Turned out that the factory alignment of the polar scope with the rotation axis of the mount was out.
So I spent a good half hour with the polarscope centred on the chimney pots of a house about half a mile away and a tiny allen key. Basically the task involved centreing the polarscope then rotating the mount 180 degrees around the R.A. axis. It's when you rotate it that you see the error, if the polarscope was correctly aligned then the centre reticule would stay on target as the mount rotates. Once you see the error you have 3 adjusting screws to set the reticule to what it should be.
In my case it was way out, bit of a fiddly job but the manual supplied by RV Optics had a whole page on how to do this.
Can't wait now to get some longer exposure photos!
The next challenge will be to set up the setting circles so that I can have a manual goto mount!
Just found this site, looks promising......
www.astro-tom.com
Showing posts with label Polar alignment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Polar alignment. Show all posts
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Friday, September 15, 2006
Well, as it got dark the high cirrus clouds rolled in yet again. I had moved the Skywatcher outside before it got dark so was disappointed again. Then a clear patch revealed Polaris so I decided to have a go at aligning the HEQ5 mount.
I had been quite apprehensive about this, the instructions that came with the scope were very good but I was still struggling to get my head around some of it. I resorted to running Stellerium and choosing the "Equatorial mount" view, all became clear as to how it should work!
So tonight I bravely got on my knees to peer through the Polarscope and managed to align the mount. I will post some tips on this at some point, assuming that I succeeded...anyway, due to the poor seeing I decided to try out the camera mount with the mounts' tracking ability.
After a few attempts I managed to get this image of Vega....
This 2 minute exposure would appear to prove that the scope was aligned sufficiently for this exposure length :o)
I had been quite apprehensive about this, the instructions that came with the scope were very good but I was still struggling to get my head around some of it. I resorted to running Stellerium and choosing the "Equatorial mount" view, all became clear as to how it should work!
So tonight I bravely got on my knees to peer through the Polarscope and managed to align the mount. I will post some tips on this at some point, assuming that I succeeded...anyway, due to the poor seeing I decided to try out the camera mount with the mounts' tracking ability.
After a few attempts I managed to get this image of Vega....
This 2 minute exposure would appear to prove that the scope was aligned sufficiently for this exposure length :o)
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