There was a break in the weather last night so I finally got to have a play with my Star Adventurer mount, even though it was a bit windy.
The main aim was to see if I could polar align the mount. Firstly I set my tripod pointing south as best as I could. Next I leveled the tripod and set the equatorial wedge to 38°. From what I have read, this should point me in the general direction.
I had read that the magnetic deviation is slightly east, so I used the adjustment on the wedge to rotate the mount around and after a few minutes the four Octans stars were visible in the polar scope.
I am not sure if I got lucky because I have read a lot about it being difficult to find! The three stars that are around magnitude 5.5 were easy to see but the magnitude 6.5 star was just barely visible in the polar scope. I took a JPEG straight off the camera and you can see where I have labeled the stars. It was a 15sec exposure at around 125mm.
Earlier, one thing I noticed was that you couldn't use the illuminator with any equipment attached to the mount. I thought that was a very poor design! So I took my Dremel to the dovetail bar and grinded out the opening so the illuminator can fit and be used with all of the equipment mounted.
After I aligned I got the tape measure out to get some sort of reference for next time and I found that the tripod was exactly square to the back of the house.
Now with that out of the way hopefully the weather clears up and the wind goes away so I can try and get some photography done!
