Help Navigating with a Star Adventurer

[5haan_A]

Hi Guys,

I recently purchased a sky watcher star adventurer pro. I thought that it would be a quick and easy solution when travelling away. However what I have found is that it is very fiddly to navigate around the stars. I am not much of a visual astronomer and usually I use software to go to and image various targets with ease, not so with the star adventurer, I have to say that I am really struggling with it.

 

My SA set up is this, SA mounted on a decent-ish tripod., a redcat 51, a guide scope connected to PHD2. and finally an unmodified canon dslr to image with. I use sharp cap to do PA, which is easy enough, beyond simple polar aligning though I really struggle to get to precisely what I want to image. 

 

If I fiddle too much with the mount often I knock it out of polar alignment, but the problem is that I need to fiddle with the mount to navigate to a target. I am trying to follow this method here which is a manual go to method for the SA. It's the best I have found, but still it is much harder to implement than I had initially thought. 

I would be very grateful to hear your advice on how I can manage better. I don't want to be spending hours attempting and failing to navigate around the stars and waste precious imaging time, and I would really like to unlock the potential of this cool little mount.

 

Best,

[Victor Boesen]

I've owned the star adventurer for three years now and used it many times with my 50mm prime lens and evostar 72 ED telescope(And I love it!). I've found that locating the targets is a matter of loosening the RA & Dec knobs/locks and pointing the telescope in the general direction of the object. Then I often lock the Dec axis (but leave the RA unlocked) and then use the small knob to move the Dec axis for fine tuning. I keep the RA axis loose and move it by hand since the two buttons to tune the RA axis are in my opinion very slow so I'd rather use them at the very last step, which is fine tuning the framing of the object. After I've located the object by either by looking at the live view or by taking short exposures with high ISO and etc. I then lock the RA axis and use the knob for Dec adjustments and two buttons for RA.

The entire process is a little fiddly and yes, I have also tried knocking the mount when locating the object, but I normally check polar alignment after locating and framing the object anyways. I hope that helped you a little;)

Good luck with the mount, it's a great mount for the value I'd say.

Victor

[Kyle Allen]

I normally start on a bright star close to my intended imaging target. Then I use SkySafari with Equatorial Grid enabled to move one axis at a time towards the target, taking short exposures every so often and matching what I see on the camera to what I see in the app so I don’t get lost or overshoot the target.

For this method to work well, it helps to have your camera aligned along the Right Ascension or Declination axis. Also, you will need to add your equipment to SkySafari to display the field of view of your scope/camera. 

[Simon Pepper]

I have the sky guider pro and redcat and have had the same issue! Was out the other night got perfect polar aligned then every time I position my camera to something to shoot it takes ages to locate. Once faffing for thirty minutes and moving it so much I dont dare check my alignment as I bet its completely lost! I think the issue with me is the £60 tripod just doesn't cut it! I got it for lightweight but clearly there is a trade off. Lighter is less sturdy. I wonder if you have the same issue. I agree with Victor ramp up the ISO with a few second exposures to find your target and a maybe try a sturdier tripod. Also I have heard mounting a laser pen on the side can help with direction although I have not tried that yet and be sure to turn it off if planes in the area.

I just posted abut some feedback on an imaging session and I could not for the life of me get Andromeda in the centre of the frame I gave up in the end and the resulting image clipped off the smaller galaxies! 

Thanks 

[5haan_A]

Thanks for the input. It sounds like it is tough to get right and fiddly no matter what.

 

I settled on method that seems to yield some success. It might not be pretty but it does work. 

 

What I do is eyeball approximately where the target is and move my mount manually to that position. I then take a series of single frames, around 5 second exposures and feed them in to astrometry.net. This gives me an exact position of where I am. I use this information plus sky safari to start gradually making my way over to the target with manual adjustments. Once in place I pray that PA is still good and star shooting. 

Its not as exact science as what I would want but still it helps me get some results. 

Thanks,