Getting proper polar allignment with a fork mount and wedge!

I didnt realise you ont have left/right slow motion controls on thw wedge, I'd imagine this makes it abit more tedious.
Have your gotos improved??

I didnt realise you ont have left/right slow motion controls on thw wedge, I'd imagine this makes it abit more tedious.
Have your gotos improved??

Dave,
I only roughly polar aligned it at the mo. It is currently pointed at the north star and when I rotate the scope on the RA axis, the north star moves very little when I use a 30mm eyepiee. So, I've two step left; improve the accuracy of getting polaris in the centre of a smaller focal length eyepiece; then when finished with that, adjust the wedge to compensate for the differene between true north and polaris.
Anyway, to answer your query, my gotos improved dramatically. Even from it's current state I selected "Easy Align" - left the sope select two stars. Vega was the first star and the scope pointed towards it. However, I was clouded out in that part of the sky so I just accepted the position where the scope stopped. After this, the scope slewded towards Capella. When the scope stoped rotating, Capella was well within the FOV of the finder. Just to test the overall accuracy, I didn't adjust the positioning of Capella and just accepted the default position. I then told the scope to slew to the Moon - despite all the above, the Moon was only about 0.5degrees off, which is very good accuracy considering I hadn't finished my polar alignment or hadn't properly selected my two alignment stars. This is a vast improvement over what I got previously in polar mode. At this rate, once I'm finished my polar alignment, I would expect my gotos to be bang-on every time.

Michael - can you drift align? I presume you can because you have wedge. That seems to be the recommended method to really get close once you've done the 'rough' alignment.

Cheers

Dave

Thats great news Michael.
Once you have it bang on, you should find that all gotos will easily fit into the 26mm eyepiece, and onto the frame of the canon 300D.

Michael - can you drift align? I presume you can because you have wedge. That seems to be the recommended method to really get close once you've done the 'rough' alignment.

Cheers

Dave

It's something I've looked into briefly before but it semed alot of hassel. For now, I'll improve my polar alignment the way I'm going and then I'll try some imaging. If it needs further refinement, then I'll try the drift alignment method.

When you're ready Micahel, give me a shout. I struggled with it for a while but since found some really good tutorials. And it's worth it.

Cheers

Dave