Comic Update: A somewhat disappointing experience for my first night trying to drift align. Three painful hours of ..I wonder this and wonder that, there was so many questions running through my head. I never got to the AP side of things. But I ended up laughing it off and thinking im I over analyzing this whole process. By the way I used BackyardEOS drift alignment as the reference program via DSLR. Well I have some questions for you all, now I ran with Humayun's and Paul's instructions which are straight forward but. I ended up stuffing the whole thing, now go easy..a stupid question is one you don't ask....right lol.
I couldn't get my head around what angle to have the cross-hairs. I mean center a star manually track east and west and if the star is running fairly straight along the line...center and adjust off that? looking for the north and south shift?
"Paul" (Repeat both again if you have made big adjustments.) Adjustments..wow you really need to be very careful when making a correction on both ALT and AZ as I found out. I'm guessing slow and easy dose it because I would accidentally go to far one way then the other. Just felt like I was chasing my tail with this one. I did having tracking off completely.
What the time period for drift alignment, because it doesn't take long for the star to disappear off screen. Could you drift align from the bottom of the crosshairs making for a more accurate drift?
I guess what im trying to say is there a drift alignment step by step for Dummy's or can someone lay it all out for me whats required for start to finish in detail. I really don't want to spend anther night of uncertainty. I would just use alignmaster but the stars it gives me are all to low near the horizon.
Many thanks for baring with me
. Hopefully round 2 brings more hope to the equation.
Dan.