Horizon Mapping (TheSky 6)

[Euan]

I've always had real difficulty figuring out what to image and when so I started to look into how to do this more accurately. It becomes much more critical with an automated set up as you really want to make the most of the session time.

My obs has quite a limited field of view, and one good thing about TheSky is that you can map your horizon and use that as a guide to see what objects are available and when.

In TheSky's local horizon editor you can "Copy" then open up something like Excel (I used Open Office Calc) and hit "Paste". This gives one column from 0-360 (for Azimuth degrees) and allows you to enter an Altitude value for each.

I fired up the mount and went around each of the limit points, around every 10 or 20 degrees Azimuth and marked down at which Altitude both the imaging and guiding scope had sky in their own FOV.

Then after making the spreadsheet, I filled in the missing values with averages between the two points, as originally they were just a "0". Then selected the column, and hit "Paste" in the local horizon editor.

Easy peasy!

The result is really accurate, the huge chunk out of the North is the corner of my house, with the roof sloping down to the West.

..now to figure out how to make good use of it using ACP planner

[SteveL]

ooo! Now thats useful..... I`ll add that to my list of things to do...

[Psychobilly]

Indeed will have to have a go at this as well thanks for the info...

[brantuk]

Great idea - love it - now all I need is the observatory

[Psychobilly]

All i need to do now is sort out a way of measuring it for piggybacked multiple ota's on a wedge mounted scope... wixey to the rescue I suppose....

[michaelmorris]

All i need to do now is sort out a way of measuring it for piggybacked multiple ota's on a wedge mounted scope...

From my recollection, there is a 'record' function. Carefully move the scope around the horizon and The Sky 6 records it. To make life easier, I did it in daylight.

[Psychobilly]

Cheers Mike I might have to look into that... I dont have the scope connected to a planetarium prog anymore... I run it all from the handset everythings done by RA and Dec co-ords..... I find this works better for me as it stop me dropping back to tourist mode everything is pre-planned before i go out...

Peter...

[Psychobilly]

Just gone throught he process just for the Megrez 72 as its the main imaging scope... I didnt do anythign about the offset caused by havign a piggy backed scope on an EQ mount .. I ppowered up the scope with it pointing North and the tubes "level" then used a Wixey on the OTA tube to measure the Alt angle for every 11 deg 15m of Azm with addtional points recorded fro things like trees , tv aerials etc...

I entered the values in the "spreadsheet" than I got by pasting the blank horizon then copied this back into the Skyand used the pencil tool to joint the tops of the peaks together in the Sky's Horizon Edit Dialog....

Gives an useful indication

Cheers Euan

Peter...

Peter...

[Euan]

Nice one, we could start up a competition for "Who has the best view?"

I would lose big time

[Psychobilly]

I had to build the obs in the corner of the front lawn to get that view...

I could do with a big chainsaw and getting a couple of TPO's lifted...

as I have a couple of big limes, a plane tree soem pines and copper beech trees that restrict my southerly views...

I set the lower limit to include the myriad of power and telephone cable that are around the obs...

[Euan]

Your still doing pretty well, you don't really want to be imaging anything lower than where your limit is anyway

I had to sacrifice a lot of the north to see further south where I put mine, but it was worth it. Last year before I built it I couldn't even see Orion's belt

I can't see Polaris, but using drift alignment has turned out to be worth it, I think it's much more accurate that I could ever get with the polar scope

[michaelmorris]

Here's my horizon.