BEST POLAR ALIGNMENT SOFTWARE HOW TO

Aim your telescope at a star on the meridian and on the celestial equator.Дў. You will find that you can use the centroid tool in your image processing software and get excellent results in about 30-40 minutes.ДЎ. Repeat steps 2 through 4 until you see NO DRIFT in 5 minutes. If the star drifted south on your images, then move the mount up a tiny(!!) bit.ДҐ. If the star drifted north on your images, then move the mountвЂ™s polar axis down a tiny(!!) bit.Д«. Now to fix your drift! In this step you move the mountвЂ™s permanent polar axis depending on the way the star has drifted on your images.ДЄ. DO NOT move the mount in any way during these shots. Some people prefer to take one 5 minute long shot of the stars to see its path, but it works just as well to see the starвЂ™s position move due to drift via snapshots. Take 15 30-second long integrations of that star. Aim your telescope at a star low on the eastern horizon and on the celestial equator (close is good). Use it! This will actually get you close enough to take 5 to 10 minute integrations without doing the rest of this list! You will depend on your autoguider.Дў. Some mounts come with polar alignment scope in the polar axis shaft. Manually polar align your mount to the best of your ability. In all cases, you will be monitoring North-South changes in a starвЂ™s position on your CCD images. These instructions assume that you know how your CCD is aligned on the scope (which way is N, E, S, W on the images). You still have to worry about periodic error from your mountвЂ™s drive, but any good autoguider will take care of that. The result is that you no longer have to worry about declination drift during imaging. This is for permanent installations, as it can take up to 3 or 4 hours to complete the whole process to the point where your mount is perfectly polar aligned. All this does is mess with your head and mess with your gear. I write this here, because there are so many websites with INCORRECT information about this process.

BEST POLAR ALIGNMENT SOFTWARE HOW TO

You need to know how to use a CCD imager and your telescope.

Best polar alignment software