NINA Polar alignment plugin

[Questor]

This thing is magic. Given my view of Octans has a street light pretty much exactly in line with where I need to point, PA has been a challenge for me.

Enter the NINA 3 point alignment plugin. I went from roughly pointing in the right direction to being aligned within 1 arcminute in less than 10 minutes.

Plate solving and NINA are both.... wonderful doesn't begin to describe it!

[toc]

Interesting - I tried it a while ago and it was off by a lot when I checked the PA error in PHD2. I normally use Sharpcap and that also showed it was out.

[oska]

I run the routine many times.
adjust to <1 min
rerun
readjust to < 1min
rerun until it says <1 min on the rerun
Adjust < 30 sec
rerun
readjust to < 30 sec
rerun until it says <30sec on the rerun
Adjust to about 10 secs
rerun until it says ~10sec on the rerun

Basically rerun a couple of times to be sure everything is good.

I have been chasing M45 through the clouds over the last few weeks and, for example, lost it for 3 hours and was only ~10secs off at reaquire plate solve. It absolutely definitely works.

[AnakChan]

The N.I.N.A. PA has been my default PA routine now - even when I'm using ASA AutoSlew.

As for accuracy, in the past I'd compare N.I.N.A to Polemaster and to SharpCap and the differences were minimal, arcseconds from each other. Since then I've not been using Polemaster nor SharpCap.

I may try the ASA AutoSlew routine in the future - then I don't have to switch back 'n forth between apps. But N.I.N.A. to me is just fast.