As every newbie amateur astronomer might have at some point struggled with polar alignment, so did I. In this post, I’d like to share an aid that I have started using that has helped me reduce my frustration and time required for setting up and aligning my telescope. Just FYI, I have spent many a wasteful dollar to get better at astro photography. Partly because I like to do things on my own and partly because I rush to try something to see if it works. I had initially bought the polar alignment scope from Orion. While useful, this aid requires that the scope itself is aligned. In the sense, if you place the scope on the mount and rotate the mount in the RA axis, the position of cross hairs should not move. I found that the scope I bought did not have this aligned. It required a lot of fine tuning to make sure that was the case (I don’t want to get into the details of that on this post). I used this for a few times but was not convinced that I was getting polar alignment right.
I researched a bit and and learnt about QHYCCD pole master. This device makes polar alignment a breeze. Please note that this is not very useful if you are a visual observer and do not carry a laptop with you for your astronomy sessions. This device gets you amazing polar alignment in the less than 20 minutes. Recently, I purchased a APO triplet refractor for getting into astro-photography and I before that I arrived, I wanted to test out my pole master given I was having issues with it when I tried it out last time around. I just took my camera this time to take some photos of Andromeda Galaxy with a tracking mount and pole master aligned tripod. I took few photos and one with six minute exposure. Given the warm night, the seeing was kind of okay. I will let the photo speak to the quality of polar alignment. This is an unprocessed single six minute exposure of the Andromeda Galaxy:
The slight trailing you see there can be attributed to the seeing and not polar alignment. I can say that with confidence because I saw this trailing even for a 30 second exposure photo. I had to squeeze this session in between my new born’s sleeping hours so wasn’t able to spend extended hours outside. While wrapping up my session, disaster struck – I dropped by telescope tripod mount. The stepper motor for RA axis got dislodged. I figured it out while trying to test out telescope control using Stellarium. I put the stepper motor back in place but haven’t checked if everything is working fine. I’ll need to check that when I get a chance again.
astropilotdad.com 