[Krypt0 (Adri)]

I finally got my skywatcher mount today and spend the rest of the afternoon and evening going over the equipment and trying to find a way to attach my DSLR.
I realised that the mount does not come with a way to mount my camera to it, I don’t have an OTA yet. I have ordered an Orion camera mount that fits into the vixen dovetail, I looked for ADM or Losmandy however they look to attach to mount plates which I also don’t have.
I was able to use my current tripod mount plate to fit the vixen dovetail but it’s quite short and not as solid as it probably should be but the camera felt steady enough, not to mention I have no chance to balance it.

After taking the mount outside and set up, I faced the polar scope as south as possible, being that there are city lights exactly south from where I am, I can’t even see Octanis, I spent the next 2 hours trying to guess my way through drift aligning however I haven’t gotten my head around ra and dec vs alt and azimuth and knowing what to adjust to correct what error.

Performing the star alignment was also pretty tedious with the synscan, the star options I was being given were below the horizon so I was spending time going through different stars to align too and then once I did, my 100mm lense was showing me that I was nowhere near the actual star (most likely due to my inability to polar align).

I was then eventually able to get somewhat close to the Carina Nebula and able to take a number of images, I noticed that the nebula was moving up in each image despite tracking it, and even as low as 25 second images showed star trailing going up.

The mount works beautifully, however I realise I have a lot I need to learn about how to correctly polar align in areas with too much light pollution to use the polar scope and also what corrections I make when I adjust the azimuth vs altitude.

-Adri-