Quote:
Originally Posted by NorthernLight
NOTE: if you have no clear view of the SCP, the polemaster will be no good to you as it relies on a visual confirmation procedure where you need to identify sigma octans and centre it with an overlay displayed on screen.
I like astrophotography and guiding is a big deal. I can honestly say that my guide graph shows subarcsecond guiding on many nights when aligned with the polemaster and i spend some time setting up the tripod properly. I mainly image at 600mm with an APS-C Sensor, unguided, I can go up to 2min. exposures and get images without unpleasant star shapes (sure, if you pixel peep, then you’ll see some but not when printed on a postcard).
In combination with the software mentioned, and leaving most of the equipment pre-assembled, I am setup in 30min. and that means mount aligned, target centred (even if it’s not visible in the viewfinder), guiding procedure complete and guiding stable, exposures dialed in for auto capture with dithering and remote controlling the whole shebang from my iPad via TeamViewer.
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I suspect I have a slight dilemma in that my house obscures a clear view of south and my backyard is tiered so I can only go lower which makes it worse... I'm still learning the night sky and everything looks like Octans shape if you try hard enough.
Last night was moonless and I went out there. I hooked the mount up via laptop and used stellarium + EQMASCOM. I managed to get it to work the other day during the day (just forwarded stellarium to 9pm) and it moved relatively close to where Orion would typically be etc. But last night it didn't want to play properly and whilst I had it line up with Canopus, selecting Rigel meant the mount moved perhaps 5 degrees and just stayed there, rather than spin nearly 180 degrees to face North West-ish.
As time was of the essence I just manually moved it. It still tracked ok, not ideal but I managed to take 80, 30 second exposures @ 4000 ISO. The uploaded photo is an unstacked shot from the camera. It's not good. No matter how i fine tune focus, and at 30 seconds I get pretty average star trails. Crazy thing is, it looks excellent in the view finder, and even if I export them to the PC.. it's when you crop and zoom in, do you find out how bad it is.
Still, one must persist!