old style EQ6 polar scope help

[Hughesy94]

Hi Guys, i'm trying to polar align my old style EQ6 motorised mount. This is my first time using the mount and in truth i have no idea what im doing, but after scrolling through websites and watching youtube videos, im under the illusion that you take the small circle cover off the top of the mount, and then look through the polar scope to align stars. Ive had several cloudy nights where i live and id read you can do it during the day by lining up an object such as an antenna or something to the crosshairs and then seeing if it stayed tracked as you rotate your RA axis? Well im currently trying to point it at an aerial on a neighbours house, but for the life of me all i can see when i look through the polar scope is the drawings of the constellations on a black screen? Am i doing something completely stupid here?

 

Cheers, 

Alex

[Cornelius Varley]

You might need to lower the counterweight bar and rotate the DEC axis to open the polarscope aperture.

[Hughesy94]

Yeah, shortly after reading this I thought I'd just start spinning the axis around to see what happened and low and behold everything came into view! Classic case of me being silly. Cheers Cornelius Varley!

[Cornelius Varley]

It catches a lot of people out.

[spillage]

Yep been there brought the tee-shirt. I knew all about the dec having had the eq5 but the weight bar did waste my first clear night with the mount. 

I have learnt that no matter what always use new gear in daylight as this makes solving problems much easier than fiddling around in the dark.