How do you (manually) polar align a harmonic mount like the ZWO AM3/5 or SW Wave 100/150i ? It seems that by design they can't have a polar scope built-in... 馃 #astronomy #astrophotography
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@corpsmoderne ZWO has no incentive to provide such capability. They want you to buy an ASIair.
Maybe 3d print something to let you attach a polar alignment scope to the mount?
@malcircuit yeah, I was curious what was Skywatcher position on this and found that in the wave 150i manual:
2.2 Polar Alignment Based on Star Alignment:
1.Run a 2-Star alignment with the SynScan Pro app or the SynScan hand contoller.
2.Run the polar alignment process.
3.Repeat the above steps for two or 3 times.
2.3 Polar Alignment based on Imaging
[...]
I guess doing that 3 times gets old pretty fast but I've a hard time letting go 馃槄
@corpsmoderne I often do polar alignment several times with my ASIair to make sure it's consistent. I've been fooled before by only doing it once and discovering later that it wasn't aligned nearly as well as I thought.
@corpsmoderne Do you need to polar align without *any* control computer, or do you need to polar align for visual (no camera in the optical train)? If it's the latter case, you can use a small guidescope + camera attached to the main OTA to do polar alignment.
@corpsmoderne My HAE43EC I bought with an iPolar that fits at the front to do polar alignment. Needs a Windows machine which is a bit of a bother.
@corpsmoderne If you have an eye piece (better if it has a cross hair), you can try drift alignment (never did it myself as I rely on the asiair polar alignment and plate solving).
@corpsmoderne I'm sure someone has a brilliant hack, but I'm afraid in general these mounts nowadays are built with the very assumption you're going to use some control software: with no guiding, they're not particularly great at tracking anyways.
And if you have control software, it also certainly provides a PA routine...
And if you have control software, it also certainly provides a PA routine...
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