Is the orientation of the reticle in CG4 polar finder scope important?

[SalehRam]

Hello all,

Intro below, skip if you don't want bla bla

I live in a level 9 polluted sky and that means I cannot easily if at all see Polaris with my eyes without a binocular's aid. This has led me to struggle while doing polar alignment alignment so I usually do it by aligning the scope to north using a compass, then adjusting the alt/az of the mount to roughly match my position and until I'm able to see Polaris in the finder scope, then I leave the rest to the auto-guider QHY camera to either success or fail in compensating the error margin I'm at.

End of intro!

I got myself a Polar Finderscope for CG-4 mount and it came with a blank setting circles which was something I never liked, so I managed to replace the blank one with the existing one on the housing.

I now noticed that the reticle is not oriented straight.. and I'm not talking about alignment, I already did align/collimate it, I mean the actual orientation of the whole stars on the reticle.

Is this important? or it is not relevant?

If so how can I fix it? is it just trial and error? Is it going to affect anything in my alignment process?

For reference, here is an image for how the view looks through the scope..

The mount head in these photos is straight and is not angled to any direction..

https://photos.app.goo.gl/voiKZ7zgCLf53uP9A

Really appreciate your help!

Saleh

[Ronclarke]

Mines the same, just have to superimpose the 'clock face' in your mind's eye!!

[SalehRam]

7 minutes ago, Ronclarke said:

Mines the same, just have to superimpose the 'clock face' in your mind's eye!!

Does that mean I have to turn the mount RA to match the orientation?

It would made more sense if we can rotate the actual reticle to match the time that we are looking at Polaris.. but if this is the case I assume it is not really critical to have a proper orientation as long as I am able to rotate the RA head and confirm I'm well aligned, right?

 

[SteveNickolls]

Hi Saleh,

Thanks for posting. I have the CG-5 which looks like it uses the same polar reticule so I'd expect the process is identical. You say that you have already got the polar scope aligned correctly in the mount hole as that is important to have done. The polar reticule shows you both Cassiopeia and 'The Big Dipper' asterism as depending on the season and time of polar aligning you will have an easier time with one rather than the other. Yes you will need to rotate the mount in RA to correctly guesstimate against either Cassiopeia or 'The Big Dipper'. The main difficulty in the process is judging the positional angle of  Cassiopeia or 'The Big Dipper' in the sky to correspond as close as you can to the that on the reticule as you rotate the RA axis of the mount. Some night's when the angles between the stars are horizontal or parallel to the ground you can align more quickly, other times it's really a bit of a guess. This video ought to help you here-

Using this method I was able to get 2 minute exposures with a 500 mm FL refractor.

Since that time I have purchased one of these from our sponsors-https://www.firstlightoptics.com/polar-scopes/skywatcher-polarscope-for-eq3-2-eq5.html (the EQ-5 type) which has the far better Skywatcher polar reticule such as like this-

If you use the free SkyWatcher SAM app the polar alignment feature will allow you to get more accurately polar aligned than the Celestron.

Hope you can get the matter resolved.

Best of luck.

Cheers,
Steve

[SalehRam]

Hello SteveNickolls,

Thanks a lot for the information and the great explanation. The fact that it is supposed to act like this at least makes me able to adapt and work my way through the process.

The video is great and it helped me a lot in understanding the process and how it is done... Now just waiting for some clear sky at the weekend to go out and practice and snap some long exposure images

Appreciate your help once more!

Regards