Light Pollution

[erict]

Greetings to all

I live in a town with quite a lot of light pollution.  On a clear night I cannot see Polaris let alone trying to carry out a visual polar alignment on my NEQ6 mount.  I can afford an Altair GPCAM AO130 mono guide camera with a 50mm f4 guide scope combination.  My question is: Would this combination, given the pollution  be sensitive enough to detect a sufficient number of stars to get an accurate polar alignment using SharpCap.

[Spikey]

Greetings Eric and welcome to SGL 

Are you wanting to align for visual or astro photography?

I've always found that once my latitude is more or less set using a compass and just pointing the front leg North seems to work very well.

[ronin]

Are you sure that you cannot see Polaris?

I ask as my location at home has a lot of light pollution, 3 or 4 nice old sodium lamps and at the rear an illuminate car park at a block of flats where the lights to illuminate that shine at me, they are 2 different sorts as one went and died so they replaced it with one of a different spectrum. But I can pick Polaris out fairly easy. It is very much there is the Plough so that will be Polaris.

Not sure what you ask is "possible" it reads that there is a merging of polar alignment and goto alignment to some extent. Seems to be a element of attaching camera to the scope and so aiming the scope/camera at polaris. If that is the case then that is not polar aligning.

Suppose you are no where near Dalgety Bay Atro Club by chance? http://db-astro.org/wordpress/

 

[TareqPhoto]

I live in a heavy LP area too, and i think my camera or lens can pick stars much better and easier than my eyes, i did shoot something today about few hours ago, and i swear that most stars i saw in my image i can't see by my eyes at all, and that is with Samyang 14mm lens which is nearly as fisheye lens, i can't imagine if i used a scope then.

[Red Dwarfer]

Have a look at Astronomik CLS Filters for moderate to heavy light pollution . 

[Atlantean98]

I also live in a light polluted area too, from Far North-west London. Although I get quite dark skies in certain areas like my closest nature reserve, the light pollution is a massive problem... barely just about see Andromeda if I squint my eyes, and slightly better with side vision. My Canon 1300D gets very sharp images of stars and can see more than the naked eye, but of course, long-ish exposures and low ISO of around 200-1600 will capture many more than your naked eye ever will (unless you are In a pure dark sky, even so, still applies to that too). All I can say is work with what you got, i cannot see Polaris myself, but as Red Dwarfer suggested, look into getting a light pollution filter for your scope ?