I bought my new gear back in February. Gso 6" and heq5. I'm have issues doing polar ailments. I tried drift align but give up after 30min on not getting anywhere. I then installed alignmaster and added extra stars, but again it's a fail as all the stars it picks are behind trees.
At my home backyard looking east the trees maybe go to about 20 meters tall. To my south is the highway plus the trees go about 30 meters. My north is good plenty of open sky close to the horizon. My west is very bad all tall trees.
Any tips for doing polar alignments as I cannot see my both my horizons?
The DARV method of drift aligning requires the first star to be near the meridian, which is o.k. for everyone. The second star can be either in the
east or west, in your case east. The nearer the second star is to the horizon
the better the results will be. My west is useless, and I can only get down
to a bit under 25 degrees in the east. I get pretty good alignment using that.
Google DARV polar alignment, and you'll find a full description of how
to do it. One benefit is that once learnt it is quicker than traditional drift
aligning.
raymo
I have found PHD2 to have a really good PA routine. I use it when I head up bush and forget to bring a compass and stuff and just end up working from an eyeball placement. Less than 5 minutes of drift alignment gets me pretty close, I use the Accurate Polar Alignment routine I'm TheSky after that.
Lets try again tonight as from the past week the weather has been bad. Cloudy nights and then strong winds.
I can still see Orion before it goes below tree line. I guess its good to use either Rigel or betelguse as they are bright stars. Or use the 3 middle for drift alignment. I can't see Spica as its behind trees until it gets higher.
Update: Best I got was 40' or bit over half a deg. At least it's better than my first attempt which was a few deg. I did use PHD 2 which did help.
Ben
I tried again last night 5/may as the weather was stable. My Polar alignment was better I was around 5 to 10 arc min off. One more night should get me a good polar alignment of under 1 arc min. I spent about 2 hrs doing this in 10C temp.
I had issues using EQmod when I was near the meridian, EQmod would just stop and display meridian limit.. After reading about it, I found out its a safety issues and you can turn it off.
Is their any other tips people can give me?
I do level my tripod each time so its flat. I also balance my telescope also.
I use a ZWO120mm as my guide scope and I just bought a EQdirect USB.
My camera is a Nikon D7100 plugged into BackyardNikon trial version.