Can anyone help - I've directed this query in the following e-mail to Celestron technical support. I'm not asking what is the process to do a drift alignment, I want to know how to instruct a CG-5 not to automatically correct for mis-alignment error of the axes so I can properly drift align in the first place!
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Lance,
I've now built a permanent pier for my CG-5 goto mount and I'd like to drift align it to get it very accurately point to the SCP. Three questions:
1. If I go under utilities and run the polar alignment process it moves close to Sigma Octans then says do a manual adjust so its perfect and re-align. To familiarise exactly where these two dim stars should be can I easily first just say go to Sigma Octans so I can see where it should be pointing, then say polar align to sigma octans and see how much it moves so I have a better indication of the amount and direction of correction I need?
I can't find a menu item to get the mount to just normally slew to Sigma Octans - how can this be done?
Shame Celestron didn't choose any bright alignment star that is visible to execute! For instance imagine if it said fine I'll slew to where say Antares is pause for 30 seconds then move to show how far it believes the scope is away from being properly drifted aligned using bright Antares in this example as the relative checkpoint, and then you manually adjusted the base until you had it right and then re-aligned it would be much easier, given you have one very bright star to point too. Maybe consider this on your next major upgrade, as you are just trying to correct both East/West and Up/Down delta's. You need not choose one of the dimmest stars on the sky to do this with if the scope itself has already calculate how far away from the SCP its axes are!
2. under the Menu -> utilities - display alignment menu it gives me a read out of two numbers something like elevation 67 (which looks like 90 - Sydney's latitude of 33.5) and negative 1 degree 3 minutes which I am unsure means East or West of the SCP? Does the -ve mean I am too far East or West of Celestial South?
3. Can you actually drift align a CG5 once you have done a 3 star alignment, or does the self correction of the mount itself make this impossible to do after alignment?
The way I understand it say my mount is within +/- 3 degrees East/West and Up/Down of the South Celestial Pole and I do a 3 star alignment. Then the mount determines my error and automatically compensated for this in both RA and DEC when tracking any star. If it was perfectly aligned then my pointing and tracking performance is probably greatly improved as the mount only has to every slew the RA to keep any star in view. However because of this compensation if I align and try and then attempt to drift align my mount is working against me because it is automatically compensating for DEC error meaning such error is hidden from me?
So if I want to drift align do I either somehow let the mount know this, not align at all or should I just do a 1 star align so the mount can't adjust for DEC error and then do my drift align?