Friend swore his star tracker alignment trick was wrong, then it worked perfectly

My buddy Mike told me to skip polar alignment and just face my Sky-Watcher roughly north at a star party in Big Bend last month. I laughed it off but tried it when my battery died halfway through setting up, and my 30-second exposures of Orion were actually sharp. Am I missing something, or is that luck?

3 comments

3 Comments

thomas1052mo ago

Wait, are you telling me your buddy Mike actually got a sharp 30-second shot of Orion with zero alignment and a dead battery? That's insane. I've spent hours tweaking my polar alignment with the polemaster and still tossed half my subs from a 50mm lens because of trailing. Maybe my mount is just junk or I'm doing something totally wrong, but hearing you and that Cloudy Nights guy get clean 60-second subs on a 135mm just by eyeballing it makes me want to throw my whole setup in the trunk and test this tonight.

sam_wood602mo ago

Mike and I were out at a dark site in West Texas two years ago, and I did the same rough north trick with my Vixen Polarie. Got 45 second subs of the Lagoon Nebula that looked better than anything I'd done with a full polar alignment at home. It's not luck if you're within a few degrees of Polaris and your exposures stay under a minute. The tracking accuracy falls off fast past that, but for wide field shots it works more often than people want to admit.

the_ben2mo ago

Oh man, that totally lines up with something I was reading the other day. There was a guy on Cloudy Nights who did a whole test with his Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer, just eyeballing Polaris through a gap in the trees, and he was getting sharp 60 second subs on his 135mm lens. I think the real secret nobody talks about is that for most consumer trackers, even a perfect alignment only gets you so far before field rotation and periodic error start to mess things up anyway. So if you're already within a degree or two and keeping it short, your results are basically the same as someone who spent 20 minutes drift aligning. Makes me wonder how many people overcomplicate their whole setup just to get the same 45 second shot.