ASIAir "All-Sky" Polar Alignment Tutorial

a few weeks ago zwo released a firmware update for the asia air and one of the most exciting new features is the all sky polar alignment essentially this is going to allow you to do your polar alignment even if you can't see polaris or the northern sky in general this can be especially helpful if you're living near the equator where the north or the south celestial pole is pretty close to the horizon and you don't have a clear view of polaris for example or if you just want to shoot from your front yard and your house is blocking your view of polaris whatever your situation is this might really help you out if you want to give this new polar alignment method a try you can start up your asi air click on the i button and then look for experimental features as of january 2022 this is where you'll find it once you click on experimental features you should see listed right here all sky polar align and then when you turn on the little switch your polar alignment software has automatically been converted and just as a side note if you ever want to get rid of it you have to come back in here and turn off the switch so we've already got that up and running now we can back out of this menu and then begin with our normal workflow as always our first step is to verify that our telescope is focused and i like to use a bad knob mask to speed this process up after i've attached my bad knob mask to the front of the telescope i can take a three or five second long photo i'll see the diffraction spikes and then i can adjust my focusing ring until that central spike is right in the middle if your stars are looking good you can take off the bat knob mask and now we're ready to do our polar alignment steps but i want to be very clear here even though we're doing the new all sky polar alignment the mount itself still needs to be pointed up north ideally towards where polaris should be even though you might not be able to see it you want to just kind of guess and make sure the mount is aimed up to that general location that'll make these next steps easier assuming your mount is aimed up north roughly where polaris would be if you could see it then you can come in here into the pa menu and it tells you right there point the scope at the visible sky except east or west to me that just means point the scope north or south realistically for our example today we're assuming we can't see north maybe there's a house in the way so we're gonna aim our telescope towards the south the mount is still facing north but we can turn the telescope towards the south then once we've aimed up in that general direction we hit the play button and it's going to go through and take a photo in this case i wanted to manually slew my telescope around using the keys here in the asi air and i kind of cut part of that out but you can see i'm tapping the keys there and then i take a test photo to make sure my stars are sharp and i've got a nice view of the southern sky alternatively you can use the go to function here in the asir and aim up towards orion that's what i did last night so now that i've got my camera aimed up towards orion in the southern sky i'll change back to the polar alignment window and i can actually go through my steps even though the cameras pointed the orion nebula after we hit the play button the camera will begin taking its first image once this completes it will plate solve in other words it just looks at the stars and figures out where it's pointing in this case it was able to plate solve now it's going to rotate the ra access a few degrees and then stop it will take another photo and plate solve again it will repeat this same step one last time then when it has these three images it compares how the stars have rotated and using these calculations it's able to tell you how far off your polar alignment is it is really a remarkable achievement so kudos to zwo for another really cool feature in the asia as you might have noticed in the video my asir plus almost got pulled over because my cables are pretty short and the camera rotated further than i thought it would so i just want to caution you that if you're going to be trying this make sure you have enough clearance room you're not going to bang in anything with the camera and also that all your cables are plenty long enough that we don't have an accident out there at night once this completes we'll be ready to go through and the process is going to be the same as it would be if our camera was pointed up towards polaris it's going to tell us how to adjust our base by turning our altitude and asthma screws until our alignment is as close to perfect as possible when we click on let's go we can now see our total error in this case 10 minutes 15 seconds in your case though if you're not able to see polaris then don't be afraid if your total air here is like 10 degrees or something like that that would be perfectly acceptable and you just have to go through on your base and turn your altitude and asthma screws and get that total error as low as possible now i want to show you the discrepancy between the all-sky pore alignment and just your standard polar alignment we're going to see how far off the two values are which will give us an idea of how accurate this new beta feature really is after you click on the go to home position button here it will automatically slow your mount and your telescope back up towards polaris or where it should be and in this case because i do have a clear view to players i'll take a photo we should see it here on the preview screen and then we're going to go through the polar alignment process again this time just using the standard default option we need to remember to go back into our i menu though and then go to the experimental features and turn off the all sky polar alignment otherwise it's going to get kind of stuck in this menu so click on the eye go to the experimental features turn off that switch and we're immediately ready to go we're doing our polar alignment as normal alright and here we can see that the value it's giving us for the total error is 2 minutes 33 seconds for my traditional polar alignment if we compare that to the all sky polar alignment that was telling us we had an error of 10 minutes 15 seconds in other words based on these tests the all sky polar alignment isn't as accurate as the traditional poor alignment it's about eight arc minutes of discrepancy but in reality that's not a big deal especially considering how revolutionary this new technique can be for certain people so with that said the new all-sky polar limit does a great job it probably could use a little tweaking just to get a little bit more in line with the traditional polar alignment but overall this is a great new addition to the asi air and for those of you that have trouble seeing polaris or the northern sky you might want to give this a try and that's all i've got for you today thanks for watching and i'll see you guys in another video

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 51,415

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Id: QP2Z32e5ZcI

Length: 6min 33sec (393 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022