gave up on the scope tonight.

[Earl]

not happy with alignment yet again.... im getting very frustrated with this.

So the Canon has a 18-55 sat on the EQ6 taking 6 min shots.

Ill be playing with these later.

How many people manage to get good polar alignment with a tripod on the lawn?

Oh and someone turn the moon off please

[Ogri]

I can't even see the Moon down here!

You lucky, lucky, lucky . . . .

[Keithp]

out there drift aligning as we speak;)

[LukeSkywatcher]

The lawn is where i always observe from. When i used to observe with my 90EQ it was fine.

[themos]

How close do you want it? 3 arc-minutes? half-arcminute?

[Earl]

id like to be able to do 3 mins unguided.

[Keithp]

I used to get it down to about 4 to 5 mins with no trails on the tripod on the lawn. Now it's pier mounted I want it locked down to 20 mins as a minimum..Abitious yes, achievable...I'll let you know. I'm doing it now on 'Drift aligning Question'

[themos]

Unguided exposure means you will see the Periodic Error of your mount (EQ6 typically +/- 20 arc-seconds). Essentially, every 8 minutes your mount advances and retards by that PE. 3 minutes is a large fraction of 8, so it's almost certain that all your exposures will suffer from this. To get drift error comparable to 20 arc-seconds in 3 minutes you'd have to have a PA error of about 2 arc-minutes. So there's no point getting your PA much more accurate than that as you'll be hit from PE more than you'll be hit from PA.