[Davelrkn]

Hi All
I was told many years ago that if you were to move the scope in RA and position Epsilon Crux and Beta Centauri so that they both passed through the centre field of view at the eyepiece you would be fairly accurately Polar Aligned as they both had fairly close Dec Positions of -60 degrees.

Last night I decided to test this method and used a crosshair eyepiece to obtain an accurate position when slewing the mount in RA,but used the finderscope for coarse positioning first and then for fine tuning used the recticle.

I found on my first pass that if was a liittle off and used the jacking bolts to fine tune and kept making adjustments until I had both stars passing through the crosshair.

I found that after I had done this I had very little drift in RA and was just a matter of some further fine adjustments with the jacking bolt to achieve extra no drift as you would carry out when using the drift method.

I did not have any drift in Dec as I have that set very accurate for my site from the drift method.

I then decided to test further away from the pole region and centred on Regulus and found no drift after 15 to 20 mintues of tracking.

I was very happy with the results and found this method equal to the drift method if not better as it was very quick and easy and took less than half the time when compared to the drift method.
As a suggestion when starting this method start at Epislon first as it is a lot easier to spot Beta that Epsilon when first slewing on those first couple of passes.

I would like to know if anyone has tried this method before as I have not seen anything mentioned before of using this as a method of Polar Alignment.

Give it ago a see how quick and easy it can be to obtain Polar Alignment.

Cheers
Dave