Yesterday I moved my mount to a new location and not only was the mount not level, which threw off the very accurate latitude angle but I am wondering if it caused the Polar Alignment Tool to take very long without solving. I could have been 4 degrees too high not to mention azimuth errors on top of it!
Is my suspicion correct? If so what steps can I take so that Polar Alignment in Sharp Cap works?
I have never had a problem like this before and I recommend Sharpcap's PA tool above all the others.
Dan Kahraman
Polar Alignment Tool question:
-
admin
- Site Admin
- Posts: 13306
- Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2017 3:52 pm
- Location: Vale of the White Horse, UK
- Contact:
Re: Polar Alignment Tool question:
Hi,
certainly you can have problems if you are starting to get out towards the limits of the radius which SharpCap can plate solve in. It's possible that the centre of your frame was inside the limits but that one side or the other was beyond that limit – that could mean that a number of the stars in the frame were unknown to SharpCap and would be throwing off the plate solving. On a couple of occasions I've seen people post images asking why SharpCap can't solve a particular frame and when you post the image to astrometry.net you find it's only at about 78 N.
the fact that the mount isn't level should make any difference (aside from the fact that that can lead to pointing to some distance away from the pole). Did things improve once you have the alignment closer to target?
Cheers, Robin
certainly you can have problems if you are starting to get out towards the limits of the radius which SharpCap can plate solve in. It's possible that the centre of your frame was inside the limits but that one side or the other was beyond that limit – that could mean that a number of the stars in the frame were unknown to SharpCap and would be throwing off the plate solving. On a couple of occasions I've seen people post images asking why SharpCap can't solve a particular frame and when you post the image to astrometry.net you find it's only at about 78 N.
the fact that the mount isn't level should make any difference (aside from the fact that that can lead to pointing to some distance away from the pole). Did things improve once you have the alignment closer to target?
Cheers, Robin