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Old 23-10-2006, 10:26 PM
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h0ughy (David)
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: NEWCASTLE NSW Australia
Posts: 33,168
Quote:
Originally Posted by sejanus
well i just had a first crack at it, predictably i couldn't get it polar aligned and nor could my wife (and she's the brainy one!) and as I'm dead tired from being up last night for the f1 I'll have to leave it for another night. I did manually slew it around a bit and to be honest I really wasn't that impressed, it wasn't anything like i had seen through a friends scope but i will give it more time. kinda wondering if i should have bought that big SCT after all!

cheers

Gav
Persevere, you wont regret it. I haven't got the hang of my setup yet either and I have two eq6's!! Because your just new, well for that matter, even if you are old it doesn't matter, if you can learn by your mistakes then it will make you a better imager, scope setteruperer etc. you can only learn by stuffing up, its traditional. you get that frustrated that you want to put an axe through it to polar align it. but mate when you get it together and it works, look out, you wont sleep the whole night! between slewing to objects and then trying to image them you will look back on your erroneous nights and remember the moments of wanting to give up. You never will after you achieve the smallest milestone - knowing your equipment.

ask ponders about my setup at duckadang this year, I tried to drift align for hours without success, then along comes Mr I can fix it in a jiffy, and the bugger did too, in less than 10 minutes. I was close and didn't even realise it. If you can Gav rope someone off the site who lives near you to come over one night and run through the setup with them, maybe they could help identify what you need to learn or show you what to do. With octans it is very faint, under a full moon or light polluted areas forget it. go a compass, point south then go 10 degrees or so towards east and line up the mount in that direction and make sure its level. Then read up on all the drift alignment threads (1ponders in in most) and try it out. but just do that for the whole night until you can get it down pat! then show us the results with a few stunners mate of globs, nebs and widefields ( oh no more girlie links, my wife thinks I am over exercising the optic nerve)
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