Steve Ward

Small half chance gap was pretty much as good as it got today , 19 frames stacked from a set shot through cloud but AS!3 levelled them out for me nicely ... When the big bit of blue came along it was back to the dreadful mush so the cloudy version is the one I stuck with ...

That's witchcraft not 'simple' ... I'll stick with solar for the time being , it's easier to find ... 😆

So you just point the 'scope anywhere , take a snap , the software recognises the part of the sky and then slews to the correct position ... ?

But how does it get you to the target initially , I understand how it can "tweak" the pointing to centre a target once an initial image is taken but not how it gets to the target in the first place. Easy enough with planets , Moon or even M31 , M42 where you can pretty much aim by eye , but for some 'invisible' narrowband target it must need tht initial alignment ?

I understand the basics of plate-solving , well I thought I did , but how does it point the scope in the right place in order to take an image to plate-solve from , or am I missing something here , so please enlighten this dinosaur ... 😆 I assume you have to input the relevant info first as you would to do a basic go-to alignment without all the added complications that are being suggested , seems like a classic case of being asked to sprint before actually standing up from here ... 😏

I would assume that you need to do a Go-To 1,2 or 3 star align before using NINA or any other software to slew to a target. TPPA is just polar aligning the mount , i.e. making sure that it rotates accurately in relation to the celestial pole , this has nothing to do with pointing accuracy of the Go-to which needs to know ... 1. The starting position of the telescope / mount , generally the Home position. 2. The location of the mount on the Earth's surface , hence the co-ordinates you input. 3. The time , date , year in order to know what is where in the sky at that particular time in order to be able to slew to a particular object. The more accurate the infirmation you enter the more accurate that initial slew to target will be .

My HEQ5Pro sat atop a 14' high wooden pier for about eight years without issue and now sits on a wooden Berlebach Planet ... 😏

Could you save your image as a .png or .jpeg so that it's automatically shown on the post rather than having folk have to download it just to view it , thank you ... 😏

Hello and welcome to the forum ... Please save your images as either .jpeg or .png format so that they can be seen in the post without having to download them first. No disrespect intended but I for one will not download unknown files from an unknown source , especially from someone's first post. Regards , Steve.

Had to wait a while but eventually a tiny patch of blue drifted by in the right place , grabbed 22 decent frames before it closed in again ... 😏

About 5000 visible to us , but the Earth gets in the way of a lot of them so we can never actually see more than about 2000 ... 😏

Who's Nina ... 😄 I'm talking about when you first power up the mount , I'm guessing NINA bypasses the common way of aligning for some new-fangled computerised method so I'll bow out of the conversation now and leave it to the whizz-kids to sort you out .... 😏

When you are initially setting up the mount ( you haven't specified a mount so I'm assuming a Skywatcher Go-To of one sort or other) you have to input Date , Time etc and there will also be a Timezone and Daylight saving question too. As we're now in BST (again assumimg you are in the UK) then you need to press Yes to the Daylight Saving prompt. Failure to do so will send the scope pointing 15° off your intended target ( 15° / hour rotation)

Sounds like the time input was astray , daylight saving missed maybe ... ?

I had to shrink the Stellarium screen to get it all in as the cardinal points will tell. Polaris sits about 52.5 degrees above the horizon from your location , a little over half way between the horizon and the zenith.

As it is now .....

Well that'll be your problem , Polaris can't be overhead unless you're at the North Pole ... 😏

You say in the OP " it seems as though polaris is at a higher elevation" ... how far off does it appear ?

No use getting too technical if the mount's not pointing in the right general direction.

Have you shone a torch down the hole while looking through the polarscope to check that there's not some obstruction , might need another pair of hands.

Welcome to the forum Liz. Don't take this the wrong way , but did you remove the blanking cap on the other side of the mount to the polarscope ? Another possibilty is the counterweight bar not fully extended which will block the view. Things can easily get forgotten in the dark.

The seeing has dropped off today , didn't stop me bunging another Barlow on for a close-up though , wobbles didn't warrant swapping 'scopes and cameras ...

If I recall the flashing light denotes low power , probably with the 'scope up top it's a little too much hence the solid light under no load. Flashing light indicates "approaching low vlotage threshold" .