The glory of the 'heavens' above us are real, their starry splendour is visible to those who look up; but the glory of 'Heaven' is a sad delusion of human minds. This is the personal blog site of an atheist astronomer.
Wise words
"My respect is for more than 100,000 Australians who really did die for us."
A new device by QHY for polar aligning an equatorial mounted telescope.
After nine years using my Alt-Az mounted LX-90 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, I was beginning to feel that I had taken it as far as I could - and that to improve my meagre attempts at astrophotography I would need to buy a wider field telescope with an equatorial mount.
I bought a Skywatcher ED120 refractor with a Skywatcher EQ6-R equatorial mount.
I was very happy with the purchase but I knew from my previous experience of trying to polar align the LX-90 in equatorial mode that I would probably need to allocate several months to mastering two things: polar aligning the mount and using a guide-scope. I decided to take it slowly and concentrate first on polar aligning and worry about the guiding afterwards.
After a few attempts at polar aligning using drift aligning with PHD - with some dubious results - I concluded that it might take even longer than I hoped
Then I saw the new PoleMaster from QHY - and this video in particular from ASTRONZ in New Zealand, demonstrating how to polar align very accurately (especially in the Southern Hemisphere) - and only spend a few minutes doing so:
I watched it a dozen times and I ordered one, which arrived yesterday from Gama Electronics - the sole distributor in Australia.
PoleMaster works by sitting a CCD camera in place of the polar-scope. There are several steps to be taken when using the software but essentially it achieves three things:
1. determines the location of the South Celestial Pole on the 11° x 8° live image.
2. determines the centre of axial rotation (of the mount) on the same image.
3. directs you to move the alt-az bolts until the two centres coincide on the screen.
Here it is, fitted to my EQ6:
The claim is not only that it is much faster than drift aligning - but that it also achieves an accuracy down to 30 arc-seconds.