Last night I tried something different: can I detect Caph (β Cassiopeiae) variability by taking pictures of it for hours and analyzing it's brightness. And the answer is: no, I can't 😅 (please don't show this toot to conspiracy theorists).
But I've also used for the first time a homemade way to polar align and it worked decently well... (more bellow 👇 )
#astronomy #astrophotography
So I've this app I've coded that I use to capture my pictures (I should clean the code and open-source it really, one day maybe...). And I've added this mechanism to polar align:
- center Polaris in your polar scope (dead center)
- In the app, place a marker on Polaris (the red square one), and another on HD5914 (which is the brightest star next to Polaris) (the red diamond marker). Then the app shows you where the true pole is, and where you must "move" Polaris to to be polar aligned... 1/2
... then you just have to use your mount Alt and Az knobs to place Polaris bellow the green circle and you should be done. It works well in "live view" mode in my app.
I then plate solved the result with astrometry.net and I'm pretty happy with the result.
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