Quote:
Originally Posted by Xeteth
I personally haven't done any planetary/lunar imaging so I'm not entirely versed on tracking those objects. However, I too found the SW handset a little clumsy to use and instead opted to use plate solving for DSO target acquisition.
In basic terms, plate solving involves the process of selecting a target from a library of objects and having the mount slew to where it believes that object should be. It will then take an image and assess the star patterns on that image to determine exactly what it is looking at, once completed it will automatically determine who movements need to be made to hit that target so that it's center of frame.
I used the plate solving feature in Astrophotography Tool (which uses AllSkyPlateSolver or PlateSolve2) to do this and it worked flawlessly. The only thing you'll need to make sure is that the mount starts in the home position before doing this (since the EQ6 doesn't have encoders and therefore doesn't know the position it's in). It was a bit of a task to set it up for first use, but once done it made DSO imaging a breeze. I could be locked on any target I wanted within a minute or two of being polar aligned.
Hopefully someone else can shed some light on planetary aquisition/tracking  |
Thx David, as a newbie it’s only baby steps for me at present, perhaps I’m making too big of a deal of things at the moment. I’m pretty good at polar aligning with using a polar scope and locating the Octans trapezium, so I think there will be no issue with wide field objects, it’s the tiny ones needing high power that will be more tricky. I still have some essential items to acquire esp. Bahtinov mask etc. Fox