Polar Alignment...
I would like to know if its possible to use SkEye to perform a polar alignment of my equatorial wedge/fork SCT for use with astrophotography? It does not seem so obvious to me how it could be done as one must essentially figure out the relative orientation of the mount's axes to the celestial axes and then give the user some info about how to realign the mount's degrees of freedom. I am in the Southern Hemisphere and it is very difficult to perform polar alignment here.
Polar alignment through SkEye Cam is working well in multiple tests. The accuracy achieved can be within 5 arc-minutes or better.
In contrast IMU based polar alignment is highly unlikely to be accurate. Hence, closing this.
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Fred Goodman commented
Polar alignment with the Indirect mode will get you close, but not accurate enough for long exposure imaging. Here are the steps I use:
1.Indirect mode
2.Align to stars close to your pole
3.move the polar wedge controls to center the SCP grid(pinch/stretch to zoom in)
For greater polar alignment accuracy, you will still need to perform one of the popular alignment methods (two star drift, iterative etc.) -
AdminHarshad (Developer, SkEye) commented
I am not sure how this would work either.
One possibility is rough alignment followed by drift alignment.
This is how rough alignment could be done (from Wikipedia):
1. Setup telescope and mount and ensure it is level using a spirit level.
2. Set the latitude adjustment pointer of the mount to the latitude of your global observing position.
3. Using a magnetic compass, align the mount with Magnetic South.
4. Realign the mount by the angular difference between the South Magnetic Pole and the Celesial Pole (magnetic declination). This varies greatly world wide and is entirely dependent on the location of the observer.
SkEye could help in step #1 by acting as a spirit level.
It could also help in step #4 by providing you with the declination value.
After that you would need to do drift alignment to improve accuracy.
Let me know if this sounds right, and I can then help make this happen.