Advice on Drift aligning with/witout Eqmod

[beamish]

Need to start thinking about improving my alignment and hence an improvement in my planetary imaging.

Just had a butchers at Andy's Shot glass vid and all seems straight fwd, but heres the dumb question:-

Q) How do you turn off tracking temporarily, either with the synta V2 h/set or Eqmod ??

Since I've never had need to try I've not got a clue. I can't seem to see anything in the EQmod dialogue box but....

Or else can anyone else provide insights into a "Dummies Guide" via another method ??

[Psychobilly]

Without firing it up... IIRC in Eqmod theres an area with stop, star , sun and moon icons that selects tracking rate...

On the handset I think its in the setup menu under tracking ? or select rate 1 and track backwards - which should effectively stop tracking...?

[steppenwolf]

I can show you the EQMod method of stopping the tracking, the button is circled in yellow:-

[Psychobilly]

Not a bad guess without firing it up then .... havent lost all my marbles yet... just most of them... time to take up tiddly winks...

[Demonperformer]

time to take up tiddly winks...

As long as you don't start winking when you should be tiddling:)

[beamish]

Without firing it up... IIRC in Eqmod theres an area with stop, star , sun and moon icons that selects tracking rate...

Of course there is DOH ! What a DONKEY !! hits head on wall !

Cheers Peter

et Steve

[martin_h]

Also the 'Stop' button between the slew buttons stops all movement including tracking.

Also I use EQAlign for drift alignment and it seems to work ok..... http://eqalign.net/e_eqalign.html

[beamish]

No worries =DONE

wasn't quite the nightmare I always thought'd be

[TopHouse]

Bear i mind also that the latest sharpcap software has a rotatable and moveable reticule, I'm proud to say that addition was my suggestion and it's VERY cool! Makes it DEAD easy to align to ra & dec without having to twist camera in focuser

[beamish]

Lucam recorder comes with it too:D

[martin_h]

With EQalign you dont have to rotate the cam, It measures the angle of your camera and compensates automatically...simples!

[themos]

Last night I polar aligned the EQ6 with the EQMOD Polaris angle tool. I then took two 5-second shots (300mm lens) of the Polaris area at different RA positions and plugged the pixel coordinates of known stars (Polaris and Lambda UMi) in my spreadsheet. It reported that I had a 3 arcminute Polar Alignment error. I didn't bother trying to improve it as I was worried about clouds moving in and I wanted to do some test shots of the modded DSLR. It's good to have a number for your PA error. You can then plug it into

Drift Rate Calculator

to get the induced drift in your subs. For 3-arcminute PA error, 8 minute subs and imaging at Dec 44 degress, I get induced drift of 66 arcseconds or 18 pixels.