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Experimental drift alignment.


andyboy1970

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Experimental drift alignment.


Since my mount is on a pier it is already roughly polar aligned but it still needed a little tweak so I fired up Cartes and PHD.


Slewed  the scope to Denebola which was near the meridian at the time and not to high up.


Calibrated  PHD on Denebola.


Next in PHD I disabled the guide outputs, in the brain function, and enabled the graph.


Click PHD to guide on Denebola and watched the graph for DEC output only for 1 minute.


The trace for DEC slowly drifted down away from the centre line so I slightly adjusted the Azimuth adjusters and restarted the guiding after several runs like this I had the DEC trace running all the way across the graph right near the centre line.


Next I slewed  to a star next to M3 which was fairly low (for me) on the East horizon and recalibrated PHD.


Next in PHD I disabled the guide outputs, in the brain function, and enabled the graph.


Click PHD to guide on the selected star and watched the graph for RA output only for 1 minute.


The trace for RA also slowly drifted down away from the centre line so I slightly adjusted the ALT adjusters and restarted the guiding after several runs like this I had the ALT trace running all the way across the graph right near the centre line.


I ran through this process twice and now have a very well aligned mount.


Note: only small adjustments were made each time.

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Andy that is a brilliant way of doing it.


No prizes for guessing what I will be doing the next clear night.


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