AstroPlanner Alignment tools..

[Al.Grant]

I've spent most of this afternoon ensuring I can get the various astronomy software packages talking to my mount (all look good!) and whilst playing with AstroPlanner v2.0.1 I found it has some inbuilt alignment tools.

 

There is one called "Interative Polar Alignment" and at first glance it seems to work in a similar manner to Alignmaster.  It gives a list of 

start to slew to, the lower the 'Rating' the better.  It also gives a rough sky map indicating where the alignment star is in relation to Polaris.

 

 

The online abbreviated manual makes no mention of it, but the full manual has all the details and depending on the mount, claims to get accuracy down to approx 1 arc min - but does say this is dependent on the accuracy of the mount encoder.

 

Any AstroPlanner users out there who have given the built in alignment tools a try and how it compares to the likes of Alignmaster.  

I have the 30 day demo version of AlignmasterI and it's been cloudy since I downloaded it, I'd give try to compare them if it wasn't for this weather 

 

 

There is also a 1 star alignment and a drift alignment helper as well as a polar scope tool, showing the expected position of polaris similar to PolarFinder.

 

Al

[+RonC]

Thanks Alister, downloaded a copy myself 

[Sheila]

Quick query on this, i notice some of the RA's on the list you show of the stars.... they seem to outside the

normal for polar iteration with polaris... and score a low rating  i.e. Ophiuchi

 

i thought that the star had to be between 17 hrs 32 mins - 23 hrs 32 mins or from 5hrs 32 mins to 11 hrs 32 mins

 

or did i miss something and not understand it correctly    or it can take an age to do?

 

Sheila

[Al.Grant]

Quick query on this, i notice some of the RA's on the list you show of the stars.... they seem to outside the

normal for polar iteration with polaris... and score a low rating  i.e. Ophiuchi

 

i thought that the star had to be between 17 hrs 32 mins - 23 hrs 32 mins or from 5hrs 32 mins to 11 hrs 32 mins

 

or did i miss something and not understand it correctly    or it can take an age to do?

 

Sheila

Sheila,

 

Not really sure.  I had read something along those lines, but not sure of the actual figures and probably wouldn't know if they were correct anyway  The screenshot is from the FAQ on the website, so not sure if it was a demo/beta one or a 'live' capture.

 

I've just loaded the program and looked at the stars it gives me for now and there are a couple listed that are outside the values you gave, but they are the ones with the worst 'Rating'.  

 

The full manual does say:

 

AstroPlanner produces a list of suitable non-­polar alignment stars.

These stars are chosen according to the criteria:

 

> Magnitude 4.0 or brighter:

> Altitude more than 40deg above horizon and not hidden by obstacles. (you can input your own horizon values to take obstructions into account)

> More than 30deg from the pole.

> Not close to the same RA as the pole star; or the pose star's RA + 12 hours.

 

A rating column show how "ideal" the star is.  The lower the number; the better the star will be for the polar alignment process.

 

 

The best ones are giving me a rating of around 3 but ones outside those RA values are all over 7.

 

I have no idea how this selection criteria compares to Alignmaster.  I've just looked at Alignmaster and can't see any RA values for the stars it suggests

 

Both processes look really quite quick and easy to follow, I wonder how they compare!