Polar Aligment with big knobs

[AlistairW]

Hello,

Bit of background. I am on a solid level pier and am using Live View via BYEOS to to the focus and align.

So I thought I had polar alignment understood. However tonight I was using Alignmaster and was getting 12 minutes of arc error in both Alt and Az. Now I had also edited the sterne.txt files to include extra pairs of stars in J2000 epoch format. However I just ran in to problems which I am sure are my own fault, as I the stars it was picking were spanned the meridian.

So I went back to the SynScan handset and tried, Now I do not know what stars I should be choosing (probably ones near the horizon - but I do not have that view due to obstructions). So I was aligning on Dubhe and Alkaid ... or the opposite ends of Ursa Major. So the 2 point align would be first to Dubhe and secondly to Alkaid. Then I select Polar Alignment and slew back to my first star Dubhe. Is this ok as a reasonable alignment routine, - I repeated the procedure and managed to get 1 minute of arc error ? - At this accuracy fumbing around with the Alt\Az  knobs when I had got to this level was just not that precise.

There was one strange message on the handset that came up after the alignment - a caution about previous NPE being applied. No idea what that was refering to.

Ultimately I want to do some 5 minutes subs and will be guiding to I want to make sure I have a good enough alignmnet wihout getting totally immersed in drift alignement.

Thanks

Alistair

[Tinker1947]

I use the handset, 2 star align i go towards the east as that's my best fov, then a PA star in the same area, run this twice on different stars, a short 3 minute unguided test showed nice round stars, 20 minute guided are still round....make sure your balance is good,,,

[tomato]

Hello Alistair,

I used to use Alignmaster as, like you I thought Drift Alignment would be a bit arduous. However, I came across the DA article on Ian King's website and found this to be a really clear set of instructions to follow. After a few goes I can now drift align in about 20 minutes and always get closer polar alignment than I could with Alignmaster.