bit of a cheat for aligning with partial visibility

[oldpink]

tonight I had some partial clear sky east & south and could see Jupiter but not much else to get an alignment with the goto
so I set up roughly where I thought I should be pointing the mount and set up the scope to where I thought park would be

I then told the goto to find Jupiter and it went on its way only to be  way off

so I released the clutches and moved the scope manually to jupiters rough location via the finder scope then the main scope with a 25mm lens

I then sent it back to park mode and did the same again this time it was a lot closer to the true location so I fine adjusted the angles manually till I had it centred
I then fine tuned it with the Goto then set the alignment scope

so far tonight it has tracked Jupiter pretty accurately with only the occasional tweak at rate 4 to bring it back dead centre

I'm saving these settings so hopefully when I do get a chance to do a proper polar alignment I have a good starting point

[baggywrinkle]

What are you using, would be useful to know.

[oldpink]

initial setup was my Skywatcher Explorer 200p on an EQ5 GoTo

using the supplied  25mm skywatcher eyepiece then the skywatcher 10mm to fine tune

[baggywrinkle]

Interesting, I have the EQ5, will have to try this.

[Steve Ward]

Bear in mind that polar-alignment has nothing to do with Go-to alignment and vice-versa. 

You can plonk the mount down anywhere [removed word]-nilly and still perform a rudimentary , inaccurate 2 star align that might suffice for a quick visual session .

But it will require constant adjustment to keep the object centred as the polar-alignment is way off .

Having to move the object with the handset on Rate 4 illustrates this perfectly , a half decent polar-aligned mount may need a very small tweak on Rate 1 every 15 minutes or so.