Nifty Way to Star Align Skywatcher Mounts

[Rocket_Guy]

Hello All,

This may be old news to most of you but just in case there are those out there who are slower to find out about things than me, I would like to let everyone know about a nifty Sharpcap script that I discovered recently that will automatically star align Skywatcher mounts in a manner similar to the way Celestron performs alignments with their StarSense autoalign units. This Python script was first written a few months ago by the SynScan folks but I have only recently gotten around to using it.

To use this script, you simply point the telescope anywhere in the sky away from the pole, turn on the scope, and run the script in Sharpcap. That's it. How much easier can it get? I usually do polar align first, but I don't think that that is absolutely necessary. The script will plate solve different portions of the the sky on its own and build up what seems to be an excellent pointing model. When the program is done after a couple of minutes, you are all aligned and good to go. Much easier than finding and centering guide stars on your own while doing a manual mount alignment.

You do need to use the SynScan program to run the script as currently written, but it looks like with some minor editing, it could also be used with EQMOD. The link to the script may be found at: https://skywatcher.com/download/software/synscan-app/. Download the zip file named "Windows 10/11 program: SynScan Pro App, Version XXXX". Within this zip file, you will find the Python alignment script for Sharpcap called "Auto Align.py".

Hope someone finds this as useful as I have.

Best, Bill

[admin]

Hi Bill,

thanks for sharing - there was a previous discussion on here about that script a few months back, but at that point it worked on SharpCap 4.0 and was broken on SharpCap 4.1 because of some changes in SharpCap 4.1 python. That now looks to have been fixed (there are multiple versions in the zip file), so it's good news!

cheers,

Robin