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Old 25-09-2014, 12:46 PM
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Nico13 (Ken)
Galaxy Hunting

Nico13 is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Geelong region.
Posts: 947
Sorry guys,
All the text I posted vanished and it was the wrong picture anyway.
I'll start again as it was late when I posted last night and it obviously went wrong.
I have very good success with the method of one star goto, physically align the mount with the Az and Alt screws on the mount on the chosen goto star eg Alpha Crux or something similar distance from the pole in the East or West and at around 45 deg altitude.
I then Park the scope and check for my pole stars, there are three of them and the main one is "BQ Oct" this little red star and the two faint stars to the left point directly at the SCP and so when I can see these in the PHD image I make fine adjustments on the mount Alt and Az screws to centre the SCP in my view and I'm done.
From there on I can goto any target and it will be in the field of view and if I want more accuracy I will sync on a few stars as I go, I drive the mount with the lappy and TheSky6.
You need to have your guide scope and main scope aligned with each other and the RA axis of the mount pretty well and that's the secret to this method.
I am fortunate that my main scope camera and my guide scope camera have a very similar field of view and so when I use PHD2 I can see these three stars quite well and it also helps when framing a target as I have the frame marked in Sky Safari Pro and also in TheSky6 so I can see before I start imaging what I'm going to capture.
This method saves a lot of time when you have to setup every time you go out as I do, no Obs unfortunately.
Hope this makes a bit more sense than the previous post.

PS. Obviously the 38 deg line won't be where you find the SCP unless you're at the same latitude as me.
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Last edited by Nico13; 25-09-2014 at 12:51 PM. Reason: Added txt
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