SCT Polar Alignment & Tracking Success!

[DarkerSky]

Just want to share with you all my experience in getting my latest acquistion - an 8" B&L SCT - polar aligned and tracking the stars. I only picked it up on Monday from a chap in Lichfield. Never used a portable SCT before (mainly a dob man me!) so figuring the whole thing out was a bit of an adventure. A very useful resource I found easy to understand was this - http://www.cosmic-vo.../align4.html For anyone struggling to get to grips with aligning their SCT on a fork I'd urge you to read it.

That said I set my tilt latitude on my mount's wedge in daylight once I'd got my mount bubble centred, but then discovered later that getting the scope on the mount at that angle was too difficult for 1 person to do. So I instead flattened the wedge to horizontal so I could mount the scope, then reset the wedge to my latitude with the scope angled 90 degrees to the forks and pointing at Polaris. Had to fine tune the tripod legs placement to get it pointing north. Used a basic compass to help me do this, which rested on the flat part of the mount. Made final adjustments to get the mount level and found polaris in my eyepiece. Had to make some small adjsutments to the wedge, but got it all lined up to within half a degree of true pole in about 10 minutes.

I then slew the scope manually in RA and Dec to locate Jupiter, plugged in my RA drive and watched. At first it didn't track. I could manually twist my RA knob and it drifted perfectly. I could hear the soft whirring of the RA motor but it just wasn't engaging. Hmmmm....

So, onto Google in search of some info about RA motor tracking on B&L scopes. Not that much info around bearing in mind this scope is from the dark ages of the 1980s! But, after about 10 mins of searching, i came up with a 6 year old thread on C&N that advised to lock the RA axis. Aha! I thought. Back outside to the scope and found the RA lock and got it tracking like a dream on the RA motor. Really pleased as it was my first attempt, and the optics on the scope were fantastic too. Got a sketch off and up in the sketching section.

[Cornelius Varley]

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