Polar Alignment.

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starblind
Posts: 10
Joined: Sun Jan 28, 2018 6:43 pm
Location: Algonquin IL

Polar Alignment.

#1

Post by starblind »

Well, I tried. And Failed. Miserably. I suppose I'm not too clever when it comes to reading the instructions, since I thought I had everything set up correctly, but it failed to solve even though I could clearly see the polar star through the AT72EDII. ZWO ASI120MM and a 50mm guide scope all seemed to be working correctly. I will try again when I get a clear night, but before that I would like to know if I need to flip the screen/display in the horizontal/vertical to get it to show up correctly as I see the sky, or is the plate solving bit smart enough to figure out the image on screen is upside down and backwards. It says nothing in the manual/instructions so I'm assuming it makes zero difference(?). May be some additional settings are off, I don't know, there are no real guides for this. Maybe a Polemaster would be better.
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admin
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Re: Polar Alignment.

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

the plate solving can cope with upside down, inverted, rotated, different scales etc, so the problem shouldn't be there.

You say you can see the pole star, but how many other stars could you see (and how many did the software detect?). The most common cause of problems is not enough stars detected, which you can usually fix by turning up gain and/or expousre. Sometimes you can get in a mess by making adjustments to the star detection settings too.

The other gotcha is that if you are more than 5 degrees from the pole then it is outside the area covered by the plate solve database. You can check this by saving a frame and then uploading it to nova.astrometry.net for plate solving.

If you continue to have problems next time please grab a screenshoot of the problem (use 'snipping tool' or the printscreen key on the keyboard) and also save a frame from sharpcap with the snapshot button - those two would give me something to check to diagnose what is going wrong.

cheers,

Robin
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