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Improving PA and GOTO-The easy way?
While being eaten alive by the mozzies last night.....I found the alignment of my NEQ6 was a bit out and the GOTO accuracy marginal...
Then it came to me -
Assumptions:
1. Your time and location have been correctly and acurately entered into the Syscan (I'm still using V3.27)
2. You're happy with the SW capabilities - ie GOTO accuracy about one arc min.
3. Any "cone" error has been corrected. See SW Manual.
4. The mounting is "roughly" aligned to the pole.
a. OK. Connect the handcontroller to your PC (or use EQmod) and open your planetarium package (I use CdC).
b. Connect to your mount and make sure all the normal movement functions are operating.
c. Set the scope up to get a known bright star in the middle of the FOV (you can start by using the finder cross-wires).
d. Find the same star on CdC and sync to this star.
e. Then, using the CdC screen, locate another bright star - start with whatever is available....
f. Use the CdC "Slew" command to move the telescope to the second star.
Check the finder/ FOV to locate the target star -
g. Now, USING ONLY THE ALT/AZ adjusting bolts (Don't touch the RA/Dec) move the mount to bring the target star central.
h. Check by slewing back to the first star - repeat e/f/g as necessary (usually not!)
That's it - I feel this method is a bit like extreme drift alignment.
The first slew uses the location/time and sky cordinates to move the scope - if we were in perfect registration with the sky it would land on the target..by moving the mount in Alt/Az we are re-aligning the mount's axis to the sky...
Let me know what you think.
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