Hi so I took my new Az Gti out last night for a quick test and with just basic go-to observing seems to work fine. However I've got the eq adapter and firmware and was attempting to get a polar alignment with it with a view to some longer exposures. I already have a big rig for deep sky and am familiar with polar aligning that with it's polar scope, but this is the first time I've mounted a DSLR and gone for a smaller portable setup.
The basic setup looks like this:
Ignoring the somewhat poor tripod mounting to a camera tripod which doesn't have decent enough coupling to the base of the eq adapter for now...
Having levelled the tripod what I found that when I dialed in 52 degs latitude and faced the mount north just using a compass was that polaris was way off, like at least 10 degs. It wasn't until later that I realised why, I think, but am looking for confirmation of my error....
I had thought that the 'front' of the mount was as pictured with the camera facing north since it should be pointing up as well as North, but I since noticed that people using the similar Sky Adventurer mount seem to use the eq adaptor the other way round along with a 'descention bracket' to mount the camera the other way so that in my picture the camera would be facing right and towards the ground, but the additional descention bracket effectively adds a 90deg shift for the camera so that then points right and up in the picture and it is then parallel to the plane of the NCP when in the home position.
This would explain things, because what I was actually dialling in I think was 90-52 i.e. 38 degs latitude and hence why my finder was pointing much lower than Polaris, purely due to the primitive way my camera was mounted.
So I guess my question would be, as I can't quite get my head around it, can I just simply dial in 38 degs of latitude instead of 52 that it should be, then follow the normal polar alignment process followed by a syncscan 3 star and will this then be correct, or do I need to go down the route of using the descention bracket like those that comes with the sky adventurer kit.
All this is with a view to getting some wide field longer exposures on a portable setup they can also take a SW 72 ED or my camera with 200mm lense for wider field.
Thanks in advance!