SharpCap Forums

I tried SharpCap polar align for the first time last night.

Using a 60mm finder and the DMK51 camera. At 0.5s exposure +/- 12 stars
picked up and fast plate solving - it seems to be very capable; I got within 1arc min but found any further tweaking caused excess movements.

One thing, when I started, the axis was shown above and to the left of the SCP - this to me inferred that the axis was too far East and too high. Trying to make the adjustments (ie Alt lowered, Az to the West) made things much worse!!! I ending up convincing myself that I had to move the SCP indicator, rather than the axis indicator.....
Anyone else have similar experience??

(Ran OK under Win7)

Hi,

glad to hear that you managed to get good polar alignment quickly

The direction of the offset you see in the image on screen (ie the green NCP cross may be to the right and up a bit from the red C-o-R cross) really has nothing to do with the direction you need to move the mount - the image will be inverted by the scope and also the camera could be rotated at any angle in the finder scope, so any direction in the on-screen image could correspond to 'up'... So, I'd expect that the directions between the two crosses would not correspond to the directions you needed to move your mount.

However, the directions given in text at the bottom right during the final adjustment stage (ie left/right <x> minutes, up/down <x> minutes) should correspond to the direction that you need to move the mount. If those directions don't agree then please let me know as that would mean I have a bug with them in the southern hemisphere. Please test in 3.1 if you can as that contains all the latest fixes and some usability improvements that make it harder to make 'operator errors' by adjusting at the wrong time

thanks,

Robin

ie the green NCP cross may be....

Minor nitpick - Perhaps you could change that label to SCP for us upside-down folks.

Steve.

Is it not - damn! Yep, will change that

cheers,

Robin

All set-up, but the weather has been against any further testing.....