Alignmaster -how good?

[troypiggo (Troy)]

Originally Posted by RobF

Sorry for negativity, but I think a major limitation of Alignmaster is the stars if offers - they're usually a quite a low altitude which is tough in surburia, particularly if you have to work around a decent number of trees. I suspect you'd have to be willing to load up some pairs of your own (which may not work quite as well if not spread out as far across the sky), and Alan's suggestion to finish off with some drift alignment tweaking sounds sensible.

You can add in as many stars as you like. There's been some recent threads about it:

http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...ad.php?t=82615
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...ad.php?t=73052

I think Alignmaster is very good to get a quick polar align, but agree you should do a drift align afterwards to fine tune. The method of using PHD, or Maxim, or some other guiding software where you can turn off DEC guiding and see a graph of the errors is very quick and useful.

[swannies1983 (Dan)]

I think I will have to stick with PhD for drift aligning. ASCOM driver for my mount has bugs and mount doesn't stop slewing when GoTo commands sent.

[coldlegs (Stephen)]

Anyone using the V1.9 beta version yet???? Don't know what the difference is. Tried the website/forum and google but got nowhere.

Cheers
Stephen

[mill (Martin)]

I asked on the forum but nobody reacts to it.
Also on the website the 1.9 beta link goes to the 1.7 download

[bmitchell82 (Brendan)]

shoot a message to matthew im sure he will sort it out if they have changed it. How good? real good if you ask me.

[ejd (Erick)]

Originally Posted by mill

Also on the website the 1.9 beta link goes to the 1.7 download

The 1.9 beta can be found here http://www.alignmaster.de/download/A..._9_b_Setup.zip

[mill (Martin)]

Originally Posted by ejd

The 1.9 beta can be found here http://www.alignmaster.de/download/A..._9_b_Setup.zip

Thank you very much Erick

[Grahame (Grahame)]

Tried the new beta version last night, I only had a hand full of stars to choose From but the ones I could see and two iterations later Gemini reported -4 az and 2 ele error. Good enough for imaging

There's a few new options in there and everything seemed to work as expected.

Grahame.

[Troy]

Does any one know what camera's are supported for Alignmaster?

Cheers

[Grahame (Grahame)]

Hi Troy,

as long as you align the star to the same point - it can be absolutely anything from illuminated reticule to DSLR in live preview (little harder) to cooled CCD in maxim.

Alignmaster relies on you putting said alignment star on a datum for its calculations of telescope position (read from mount) so anything goes

Grahame.

[Troy]

Thanks for that Grahame.
I now get it

[mill (Martin)]

Bought Alignmaster and it isn't working on win7
It works on win8 with a bit of kicking it.
Anyone else got it installed on win7?

[Marke (Mark)]

Running win7 64 and 32 no prob

[Marios (Marios)]

Originally Posted by swannies1983

Ok, I'm a complete newbie when it comes to GoTo and I'm not sure where to start. Well, for those that don't know, I have an EQ6 fitted with Astromeccanica motors, which is run via a DA1 handcontroller. It's a non-goto controller but you can use software to make it goto.

Right, so how do I use Alignmaster? I have put in my co-ordinates and the time offset. I'm in Adelaide so I need to put in +10.5 (I'm not sure the + is needed). If I do this at the present time (10.15PM), it says UT: 11/11/2011 11:45:00 AM at the top left hand corner and LMST :0.20:00 in the right hand corner. Is this correct?

I now come to selecting stars. I chose the first one and the scope slews but completely in the wrong direction. If I let it keep going, it will end up pointing down towards the ground. I have got the co-ordinates as EAST for longitude and SOUTH for latitude.

The ASCOM driver is outdated and there is only one that I can use with this mount. I'm not sure if this is the problem?

Maybe it's my starting position. I'm roughly pointing it towards the SCP. Is this correct?

Not sure where to go from here guys.....


Actually, I don't know what the mount is doing. It just continues to slew and I have to stop it before the scope crashes into the mount.

Just for historical purposes, I get asked this alot at star parties...

Alignmaster LMST time should match that of EQMod's LMST time which is calculated on your computers time and date. You only need to adjust your Alignmasters daylight saving time settings, if there is a discrepancy in LMST for your set location ie. Melbourne +1100.

[RobF (Rob)]

I can't for the life of me get along happily with Alignmaster in my cluttered backyard with poor horizons. Even with a filter list of southern hemisphere stars it seems a mystery whether it will prompt for pairs on the E or W side of the mount (my eastern sky is much more favourable for trees etc).

Perhaps would be much more helpful if the the first "star" could be a platesolve in a section of clear sky, then adjust each axis on a star.
Will have to try next time I'm out at a dark site with good horizons. Drift aligning just seems so easy and accurate in PHD2.

[alistairsam]

hi Rob,

I really like Alignmaster and I've gone through several methods of PA.
In Alignmaster, when I look through the list of pairs, I choose the ones that are closer to the inner circle. That way I can be sure they're not low in the horizon,
or I check if the bright ones are up, and scroll through till I find that.
I also edit the sterne.txt file just to leave the ones I can identify in there.
you could probably have two files, one for winter and one for summer with the bright ones in there for each season, and just swap out the files.

I haven't drift aligned in a long time.

Cheers
Alistair

[RobF (Rob)]

It looks like a great program that so many people swear by Alistair, but I suspect to get a good calculation one of the star pairs seems to have to be outside the 50 degree elevation circle and one inside (at least that seems to be the case for the best/better star pairs).

If you backyard doesn't allow stars<50 altitude for trees, its pretty hard though