Hello everyone,
I started astrophotography recently on my HEQ-5 and while it was making more and more sense, I'm at complete loss now.
To start with, here's a bit of my situation: many of my pictures were showing motion of stars, making the pictures unusable and time wasted. There was no wind, I used an intervalometer, didn't touch the mount. From shots taken minutes apart: some were perfectly sharp, some weren't. I figured my polar alignment wasn't super accurate anyways and since I'd like to take long exposures for nebulas, I decided to invest in a Polemaster.
I also updated my Synscan to the latest version 4.39.20, in case it would solve potential slewing issues that could cause my problem.
I leveled the mount, used the QHY Polemaster to align to Polaris, made sure the mount had an accurate home position, started the stars alignment and... I couldn't recognize any star in the sky. I used Vega to start with and couldn't notice any difference of brightness between stars (using my DSLR camera directly). I couldn't recognize where I was, or how far off Vega I was, even tho the overall aiming of the mount looked ok. In all my recent last tries I could recognize the stars, do an easy 3 stars alignment and always managed to navigate to the deep-sky objects, which is why I'm so confused. I tried other stars I've used before too, just in case, but same issue: I felt totally lost in the sky. No stars look way brighter than the others, unlike what I saw before. I did a factory reset just in case too after that and tried again without success.
Also, I never really paid attention to the Polaris location indicated on SynScan before (I use phone apps instead), but taking a look at it now, it's completely off compared to the apps. My coordinates are correct and my timezone is correct. It was showing Polaris location at 8:06 on the mount and the apps were both saying that it should be 7:41 and the Hour Angle was 19:46 instead of 20:37.
What setting could make the Polaris location wrong? Could that be the reason why I'm so off? Or would it be the system update?
For the motion issue, is that a sign of poor star alignment, or Polar alignment? (pictures attached below, I didn't have the Polemaster yet)
I'd really appreciate any help, as I just wasted hours trying to understand why... while the only clear sky of the week passed me by
Thank you!
L
I started astrophotography recently on my HEQ-5 and while it was making more and more sense, I'm at complete loss now.
To start with, here's a bit of my situation: many of my pictures were showing motion of stars, making the pictures unusable and time wasted. There was no wind, I used an intervalometer, didn't touch the mount. From shots taken minutes apart: some were perfectly sharp, some weren't. I figured my polar alignment wasn't super accurate anyways and since I'd like to take long exposures for nebulas, I decided to invest in a Polemaster.
I also updated my Synscan to the latest version 4.39.20, in case it would solve potential slewing issues that could cause my problem.
I leveled the mount, used the QHY Polemaster to align to Polaris, made sure the mount had an accurate home position, started the stars alignment and... I couldn't recognize any star in the sky. I used Vega to start with and couldn't notice any difference of brightness between stars (using my DSLR camera directly). I couldn't recognize where I was, or how far off Vega I was, even tho the overall aiming of the mount looked ok. In all my recent last tries I could recognize the stars, do an easy 3 stars alignment and always managed to navigate to the deep-sky objects, which is why I'm so confused. I tried other stars I've used before too, just in case, but same issue: I felt totally lost in the sky. No stars look way brighter than the others, unlike what I saw before. I did a factory reset just in case too after that and tried again without success.
Also, I never really paid attention to the Polaris location indicated on SynScan before (I use phone apps instead), but taking a look at it now, it's completely off compared to the apps. My coordinates are correct and my timezone is correct. It was showing Polaris location at 8:06 on the mount and the apps were both saying that it should be 7:41 and the Hour Angle was 19:46 instead of 20:37.
What setting could make the Polaris location wrong? Could that be the reason why I'm so off? Or would it be the system update?
For the motion issue, is that a sign of poor star alignment, or Polar alignment? (pictures attached below, I didn't have the Polemaster yet)
I'd really appreciate any help, as I just wasted hours trying to understand why... while the only clear sky of the week passed me by
Thank you!
L
