Polar alignment

[johntrob]

Hi,

I have a Celestron 6" Reflector (C6-NGT) with go to.

Is it worth buying polar alignment scopes?

Do they speed up the process/make it easier?

Any info and links to other articles concerning polar alignments would be appreciated.

Thank you,

John

[great_bear]

What would you be aligning for?

• Manual tracking
  
• Auto tracking
  
• Go-to
  
• Webcamming
  
• DLSR Astrophotography
  

These choices affect how accurate your polar alignment needs to be.

[johntrob]

Since I am just starting, I would be manual tracking and hopefully go to.

Photograpy is a long way in the future. first I need to figure out how to set things up.

[great_bear]

For manual tracking, you don't strictly need the accuracy of a polar scope, and (ironically) at the other end of the scale (DLSR astrophotography) polar scopes aren't accurate enough

For auto-tracking, it's nice to have the scope properly polar aligned, and for go-to - especially at high-magnification, it's pretty much essential.

Hope that helps

[johntrob]

Thanks for the input.

I will give a go without the polar scope and see what happens.

John