Thread: Polar aligning
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Old 21-01-2006, 10:50 AM
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[1ponders] (Paul)
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Obi Obi, Qld
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Hi Humayan. Check out a couple of the links at the bottom of the page. There is some useful info in some of them.

Don't trust your alt readings of the wedge, they will only be able to get you in the ball park and it's likely it will be a degree or two out.

Have you managed to find sig Oct with a pair of binocs yet? Maybe go along to a local astronomy night and get someone to show you a couple of short cuts for finding the SCP.

Being an ex-lx200 owner I can understand some of the issues you are having trying to set up with a wedge. As a suggestion, to make life a lot easier when adjusting your Azimuth setting see if you can cut yourself a couple of discs of thin acrylic sheet, or a teflon disc, or some other stiff product that has low friction. The disc/s are to go between the wedge base and the top of the tripod surface as a friction rducing bush. I found it a nightmare at times trying to get the wedge to move smoothly when adjusting the az adjustment.

If you want to get really accurate polar alignment for imaging then drift aligning is going to get you much much closer to polar alignment than by trying to do it visually.

Hope thats been a help

btw I've tried the iteration method of polar aligning with the LX200 and gave up in frustration. But if your interested in looking at other methods its an option. Try googling "polar aligning using iteration" (for a short cut this was the first search result "LX200 Polar Alignment Procedure Iterative Method" http://www.astrocruise.com/polarold.htm )
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