Unstablewarpfield Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 Dear people,Long time reader... now finally a question. Yesterday I have been playing around with me HEQ5 for the first time in a long while. My Goto's were off in RA by pretty much a long shot. Polar alignment was done by eyeballing the position of the big dipper and adjust alt/az accordingly in the polar scope. It probably can be numerous things that I did wrong for me having the weird goto's. Also... A couple of times my synscan handset gave me an "alignment failed" message. This happened when I used a 3 star alignment. 2 star alignment worked just fine.Before starting to look into where I went wrong last night, I wanted to do a bit of research on what the best sequence is setting everything up. This is what I came up with so far:1.) Put down the tripod and level it carefully.2.) Put on the mount making sure nothing moves to keep the tripod level.3.) Put on the scope, wheigts and balance.4.) Rough polar alignment by eyeballing big dipper.5.) Adjust finderscope to be in line with main scope. (Could be done by using sharpcap and a camera?)6.) Set the scopes home position. 7.) Precise polar alignment. (Alignmaster/drift alignment)8.) Correct cone error by centering Polaris and rotating RA 180 degrees and adjusting accordingly9. Redo polar alignment. (alignmaster/drift alignment)10. Execute 3 star alignment. Did I miss anything in this list? Is this in the right (or at least most practical) order?Hope to hear from you people soon And even though I wasn't perfect... still managed to snap a nice picture of our beloved big marble up there yesterday Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davefrance Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 Hi, what do you want to photograph? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Unstablewarpfield Posted February 2, 2014 Author Share Posted February 2, 2014 For now... it is planets I am after because I have no DSLR yet, although my QHY5L-II should be able to do longer exposures so defenately want to try that (last night I had M3 nicely into the viewing screen but to much winds for longer exposures.)Basically, I'd like to prepare and practice a bit in setting up my mount as if I were to do autoguiding, with main focus on:How do I get accurate goto's?How do I get precise polar alignment and what is the influence of cone error on using Alignmaster for example. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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