Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve57
Thanks xa I will be using my telephoto lens for a time so looking forward to some images soon How do you do your. polar alignment
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Polar alignment is somewhat of an art ... but the biggest thing I learned ( on here ) was that you don't align your mount with magnetic south, rather with celestial south which ( in Melbourne) is about 11.5 degrees
east of magnetic south. Your azimuth needs to be your latitude (again about 37.5 for Melbourne)
Watch as many youtube videos on the alignment of your specific you can. In the end it is relatively simple to get it right enough to use a short focal length. What you will run into issues with is being able to do an alignment ( 2 or 3 star) without a finder scope. I align using my telescope even if I am only going to us my DSLR because it has a finder scope. Should you decide to purchase a finder scope, get one with an a right angle viewer. I am too old and unfit to be doing the contortions I have to do to perform even a rough align.
Some gotchas I think you will get;
1. You will have to enter your latitude on the hand controller in degrees and minutes ... most GPS programs give you locations where the minutes are more than 60 ... which the handset will not accept.
2. Slew rate has to be set a number of times, at least once when setting up and aligning and again after you point it at your desired object. If your mount appears to have locked up when your moving it, change the slew rate (the 2 button on mine, set it to 6 or something similar).
3. Focus. If you can get yourself a Bahtinov mask for your lens, do so. Otherwise, move onto no 4 which will help immensely.
4. Get software to control your camera. I use Astro Photography Tool ( APT) but there are plenty of options (such as Backyard EOS ). Unless you use a Mac or Linux, then there are things out there but I haven't played with them as yet.
5. Chances are your first results with be rubbish but persevere. I took a long time to produce anything I was game to share but I got there, despite not being to the quality of a lot of people here. There's some seriously talented people about, use them for inspiration rather than be intimidated by their work.
Hope this is of some use,
Jeff