Tuesday, February 20, 2007


Well after spending too long at work saturday and missing COE, I decided to not waste the night and took my telescope out back for a light evening of Saturn watching, Took forever trying to figure out how to polar align, just when I had move my tripod to no end I finally had Polaris centered (Note I REALLY REALLY need to get a luminated reticle) Only to be stumped as I selected yes Polaris was centered, The scope would rotate and then point directly at the ground, I verified time and date and my location and then finally read that the scope had to be upside down, so rotate scope around I did and then aligned with the second star that my LX200 offered, then to check I entered sirius and it went straight to it albeit off, I centered on Sirius using the fine tweak controls on the wedge, went to Saturn and started to track, it was much much better not having to worry about Saturn rotating but my alignment was clearly off, I made do and snapped a 3min image which came to 1.5GB (this seemed a little high, need to check compression settings and tweak the new version of Amcap a bit) Any other good software for AVI capture?


My first video was ok, not so great, my helical focuser does a much better job at fine focusing but the seeing wasnt too great so all I ended up with was a saturn with no detail, just a tan saturn, you could see the rings and the planet but no detail.


Second, Third and Fourth videos were better but still vague. combined all videos together and still no joy, will try to take scope out again tonight weather permitting.


Any quick tips on Polar Aligning?


Thanks