Sounds about right, tonight will probably be clear *fingers crossed*, so will definitely take note of these tips
Thanks asanmax! It's really encouraging hearing from you as if you recalled earlier on, newfiestargazer and your images gave me a sense of direction I was aiming for.
Plan on collecting Sii and Oiii tonight with succesful drift alignment. Oh and btw, how were you able to make minor adjustments to the azimuth? It was quite a challenge for me to do so and it made me PA even worse on PHD2 (i gave up and decided to redo a rough PA with decent results)
Cheers!
Ethan
Hi Ethan,
So I was imaging without proper polar alignment for quite some time. I set up the correct latitude angle on the mount and was just roughly pointing the counterweight shaft North with no Polaris visible of course.
The guiding was ok, but not as great as it is now. I was getting field rotation and it was quite noticeable, especially after comparing the first and the last images taken.
One night I decided that I needed to do proper polar alignment using PHD2 drift alignment. I should say I was excited to do that as I had never done drift alignment in PHD2 before.
So I just read some online articles and reviews on drift alignment feature of PHD2 and the same night spent about 40 minutes to align the mount properly.
It was a challenge because I had to unscrew the Az axis a bit and do some very slight adjustments to point the mount at the celestial pole.
I'm sure with the Az adapter I would have had more fun as it should clearly make the adjustments in Az axis waaaay easier.
From then, I have not adjusted the mount at all, and I have literally zero field rotation now. I don't have good viewing conditions ever! It is always average or below average. On an average night the total RMS is sitting around 1 arcsec, sometimes dropping to 0.7 for 10-15 minutes, and on a below average night it is usually around 1.3 arcsec.
I read somewhere on the forums that it's better to not have the guide scope to focus precisely. They recommended to get it into focus and then screw the camera in (not out) just a tiny bit so the star image becomes a little bigger. This way the edges of the star blob become sharper and it's easier for PHD2 to detect tiny movements. That's what I did and I have a feeling that the idea works very well.