Alignmaster -how good?

[garymck]

Hi,

Have been drift aligning for a while, but getting a bit tired of doing it whenever I set my stuff up - no observatory. Wondering what people think of alignmaster, how good is the polar alignment after completing the steps? Have downloaded the demo and just received the demo key, but weather looks a bit sucky so thought I'd ask peoples opinions. Worth the price? Any gotcha's?

cheers
Gary

[Exfso]

Not sure about alignmaster, but Startarg from Andy's shotglass is great for aligning. http://www.andysshotglass.com/StarTarg.html

[Logieberra]

I LOVE ALIGNMASTER. I have a limited view of the sky at home, but I can always find a suitable pair of refernce stars.

Alignmaster will get your 95% of the way there - fast! But you will want to drift align at the end to make extra sure.

[adman]

Gary, if you have a guide camera, you can use it with PHD guiding to greatly speed up your drift aligning. Takes about 10 minutes to get pretty spot-on polar alignment.

check out this link (http://njstargazer.org/PolarAlignment.asp)

Adam

[peter_4059]

I've been happy with Alignmaster - no complaints.

[marki]

Excellent program, gets it pretty dam close in less than a couple of minutes. Only problem is when a tree or similar is in the way.

Mark

[RobF]

Alignmaster always seems to insist on one of its 2 suggested stars being at less than 30 degrees which doesn't work in my backyard. I even tried Peter's list of southern stars, but it still insists on going for stars behind my back hedge or trees. Wish you could click on a couple of stars somehow.

I've recently thrown together some code to monitor the drift values coming out of Maxim while it tracks, but doesn't correct, on a star. It seems after about 60secs you can get a very accurate (within 10 arcmins) indication of your PA error for alt or az by looking at the average rate of drift. Obviously very setup specific though.

PoleAlignMax is awesome, but you need Pinpoint.

I think K3CCDTools or Phd drift aligning is pretty hard to beat for little cost and works with nearly any camera nowadays. I realise lots of people have lots of success with Alignmaster though.....

[garymck]

Thanks for the comments, I have been using PHD to drift align, however as I am at a short focal length with my guider (200mm) I find I can't get a good enough alignment in under half an hour to avoid field rotation. Hence the desire for some other quick method, and wanting to try alignmaster.

cheers
Gary

[ReaPerMan]

I have been using alignmaster for a couple of months now and I have found it to be very good. The trick is repitition, the more you repeat and rinse the better it gets. eventually the alignment stars are dead center and I have found very little drift even after 5+ mins. With PHD guiding I tend to shoot 10 min subs with no problems.

All the best

Paul :thumbsup:

[BlackWidow]

I am also interested in trying Alignmaster with my Meade LX200.. I understand what it does but have a qestion. When I turn on my LX 200 it wants to do it's own alignment once I have done the home poition of the scope that is..

So at what point do I use Alignmaster? Do you do the meade alignment as best you can then run Alignmaster a couple of times to fine tune...??

Thats what I am guessing, but would love some input as I may purchase this an give it a try myself to speed things up...


Thanks all
Mardy

[garymck]

Well,

after trying out Alignmaster a couple of times I had to buy it. Sooo much easier than drift aligning. I found that if I did 2 iterations on one pair of stars, and a third on a different pair (takes about 5 minutes), I had as good an alignment as 30-40 minutes or more of drift aligning could provide. Not only was it quicker, but so much easier. If you haven't got it, you should have..

cheers
Gary

[stevous67]

Paul,

I've seen your past comments on your success with Alignmaster, and I echo your praise for it :thumbsup:. After three re-iterations of the process, I find I can count on at least 3-4min subs having round stars at 2500mm FL [AP900GTO+CDK12.5].

This is remarkable for a 10min or less polar alignment process. My aligned polar scope in my GE mount cannot achieve anything near this. Albeit for this process to work you must be capable of seeing both companion alignment stars as listed, otherwise the process cannot work. I do note you can make your own lists to combat this issue.

Lastly, the workflow is extremely simple.

Looking at the RMS guiding errors on my STL-11000 with AOL after using Alignmaster, guiding error is very low, with very infrequent bumps required.

I must say this is an excellent tool for mobile set ups.


Cheers,

Steve

[BlackWidow]

Well i have posted before asking questions about this program. Now I use it all the time with fantastic results. Knowing what I know now, I would have been happy to pay twice the price for it. Simply fantastic. I use PHD with it and can align in less than 10 mins. This is a must have program and works great with my LX200.


Regards
Martin

[swannies1983]

I will give this ago I think. Given my problems is DEC guiding, I will probably have to get accurate PA so I don't have to make corrections in DEC during subs.

[allan gould]

I use align master all the time and couple it with a touchup at the end by a few minutes drift align using phdguiding. After that guiding is perfect and it's far quicker and easier than anything else out there.

[bmitchell82]

I intergrate MaximDL's Point telescope here feature so as long as the star lands on my FOV which it does i right click on the star click point here and the star is dead center next, goto, point telescope here, next adjust az adjust alt. x 2 done


The other thing that i do and i have found i have better results is flushing all synced stars out of eqmod before i run the next iteration this makes sure that it is purely the alignmaster adjustments and not eqmods squirrels eating stuff.!

On my second iteration i can meridian flip and land the target albeit upside down miss jane :) pretty much dead in the middle of the FOV. best 16 bucks i have ever invested! Much faster than drift aligning, Much easier than polar alignment as i can virtually do it sitting infront of my PC screen :) ahhh youth.!

[swannies1983]

Ok, I'm a complete newbie when it comes to GoTo and I'm not sure where to start. Well, for those that don't know, I have an EQ6 fitted with Astromeccanica motors, which is run via a DA1 handcontroller. It's a non-goto controller but you can use software to make it goto.

Right, so how do I use Alignmaster? I have put in my co-ordinates and the time offset. I'm in Adelaide so I need to put in +10.5 (I'm not sure the + is needed). If I do this at the present time (10.15PM), it says UT: 11/11/2011 11:45:00 AM at the top left hand corner and LMST :0.20:00 in the right hand corner. Is this correct?

I now come to selecting stars. I chose the first one and the scope slews but completely in the wrong direction. If I let it keep going, it will end up pointing down towards the ground. I have got the co-ordinates as EAST for longitude and SOUTH for latitude.

The ASCOM driver is outdated and there is only one that I can use with this mount. I'm not sure if this is the problem?

Maybe it's my starting position. I'm roughly pointing it towards the SCP. Is this correct?

Not sure where to go from here guys.....


Actually, I don't know what the mount is doing. It just continues to slew and I have to stop it before the scope crashes into the mount.

[RobF]

Sorry for negativity, but I think a major limitation of Alignmaster is the stars if offers - they're usually a quite a low altitude which is tough in surburia, particularly if you have to work around a decent number of trees. I suspect you'd have to be willing to load up some pairs of your own (which may not work quite as well if not spread out as far across the sky), and Alan's suggestion to finish off with some drift alignment tweaking sounds sensible.

[DavidTrap]

Assisted drift alignment using PHD or PoleAlignMax if you've got PinPoint (comes with Maxim). After two iterations of the latter, I usually get a very flat guiding graph at 1800mm focal length using an Off-Axis guider.

DT

[Poita]

I thought you could use PoleAlignMax with CCDSoft and Sky6?

[troypiggo]

You can add in as many stars as you like. There's been some recent threads about it:

http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=82615
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=73052

I think Alignmaster is very good to get a quick polar align, but agree you should do a drift align afterwards to fine tune. The method of using PHD, or Maxim, or some other guiding software where you can turn off DEC guiding and see a graph of the errors is very quick and useful.

[swannies1983]

I think I will have to stick with PhD for drift aligning. ASCOM driver for my mount has bugs and mount doesn't stop slewing when GoTo commands sent.

[coldlegs]

Anyone using the V1.9 beta version yet???? Don't know what the difference is. Tried the website/forum and google but got nowhere.

Cheers
Stephen

[mill]

I asked on the forum but nobody reacts to it. :(
Also on the website the 1.9 beta link goes to the 1.7 download :screwy:

[bmitchell82]

shoot a message to matthew im sure he will sort it out if they have changed it. How good? real good if you ask me.

[ejd]

The 1.9 beta can be found here http://www.alignmaster.de/download/Alignmaster_1_9_b_Setup.zip

[mill]

Thank you very much Erick :)

[Grahame]

Tried the new beta version last night, I only had a hand full of stars to choose From but the ones I could see and two iterations later Gemini reported -4 az and 2 ele error. Good enough for imaging :)

There's a few new options in there and everything seemed to work as expected.

Grahame.

[Troy]

Does any one know what camera's are supported for Alignmaster?

Cheers

[Grahame]

Hi Troy,

as long as you align the star to the same point - it can be absolutely anything from illuminated reticule to DSLR in live preview (little harder) to cooled CCD in maxim.

Alignmaster relies on you putting said alignment star on a datum for its calculations of telescope position (read from mount) so anything goes :)

Grahame.

[Troy]

Thanks for that Grahame.
I now get it :D

[mill]

Bought Alignmaster and it isn't working on win7 :(
It works on win8 with a bit of kicking it.
Anyone else got it installed on win7?

[Marke]

Running win7 64 and 32 no prob

[Marios]

Just for historical purposes, I get asked this alot at star parties...

Alignmaster LMST time should match that of EQMod's LMST time which is calculated on your computers time and date. You only need to adjust your Alignmasters daylight saving time settings, if there is a discrepancy in LMST for your set location ie. Melbourne +1100.

:thumbsup:

[RobF]

I can't for the life of me get along happily with Alignmaster in my cluttered backyard with poor horizons. Even with a filter list of southern hemisphere stars it seems a mystery whether it will prompt for pairs on the E or W side of the mount (my eastern sky is much more favourable for trees etc).

Perhaps would be much more helpful if the the first "star" could be a platesolve in a section of clear sky, then adjust each axis on a star.
Will have to try next time I'm out at a dark site with good horizons. Drift aligning just seems so easy and accurate in PHD2.

[alistairsam]

hi Rob,

I really like Alignmaster and I've gone through several methods of PA.
In Alignmaster, when I look through the list of pairs, I choose the ones that are closer to the inner circle. That way I can be sure they're not low in the horizon,
or I check if the bright ones are up, and scroll through till I find that.
I also edit the sterne.txt file just to leave the ones I can identify in there.
you could probably have two files, one for winter and one for summer with the bright ones in there for each season, and just swap out the files.

I haven't drift aligned in a long time.

Cheers
Alistair

[RobF]

It looks like a great program that so many people swear by Alistair, but I suspect to get a good calculation one of the star pairs seems to have to be outside the 50 degree elevation circle and one inside (at least that seems to be the case for the best/better star pairs).

If you backyard doesn't allow stars<50 altitude for trees, its pretty hard though :(