EQ Mount Polar Align

[spillage]

For the moment I have to set up and take down my gear after each session until I get round to making a permanent pier.

This always involves having to PA every session and fiddle around trying to get polaris in the sight.

I have found that using a piece of wood that has either a small cable clip on the rear and a small nail at the front, a couple pen marks on the wood and scope and I can use this as a sight to quickly get polaris near the centre of the pa scope. Then its just a quick click in eqmod to move the mount into position and a quick adjustment.

I am sure I could just run phd drift align from this positon as it should be near enough.

I know its not as good as using a polar scope but for the sake of few pence so far I have found this quick and easy.

Sorry if this has been mentioned before.

Spill.

 

[UKJay1971]

If it works, it works. I never use a polar scope - I align using Sharpcap which takes best part of 10 minutes and it's accurate enough for PHD to mostly flatline on the graph.

[spillage]

I have been struggling with sharpcap. There seems to be some discrepancies between phd2 and sharpcap. Also my st80 struggled to find enough stars the last time I tried it. Do you use a reducer on your st80?

I just use this to get polaris roughly in the middle of the pa finder scope to make using phd2 a bit quicker.

[UKJay1971]

On 4/18/2017 at 23:07, spillage said:

I have been struggling with sharpcap. There seems to be some discrepancies between phd2 and sharpcap. Also my st80 struggled to find enough stars the last time I tried it. Do you use a reducer on your st80?

I just use this to get polaris roughly in the middle of the pa finder scope to make using phd2 a bit quicker.

No reducer - I turn up the gain a little on my camera if it struggles to find stars but generally, within an hour of sunset, I can easily pick up enough stars for Sharpcap to do its thing. From there it takes me 10 minutes and my PHD graph is normally very flat after that.