MoveShootMove Tutorial - Polar Alignment

now that we've walked through the basics of the polar alignment process in this video I'm going to show you the entire series of steps from start to finish for your move shoot move start tracker the first thing we always have to do of course is get out our tripod and then find north for me the easiest way to find north is to just look for the Big Dipper the Big Dipper is always going to be somewhere in the northern sky it also helps to can get out at Twilight because about an hour after sunset the brightest stars will be visible but no the others will and that means the North Star and the Big Dipper and some others will be visible before everything else and that will really help especially when we're looking through the polar scope because if you wait until it gets completely dark out at night you can have a much more difficult time although one of the great things about the move shoot move star tracker if you get the laser pointer no matter what that's really gonna help you out but again step number one when we get out in the field is fine north you could also use an app on your phone to do this and just you know go on the compass app move your phone around until you find it but that should not be too difficult even if you've gone out 1 or 2 times once you found North and you can see the Big Dipper then we need to find the North Star and the easiest way to do that is to take this corner star here in the Big Dipper draw a straight line out and that will always take you to the North Star and just so you know the Big Dipper does rotate around the North Star throughout the night as well as the year so depending on what time of night and what time of year you're out on location the Big Dipper might be in a different orientation but still gonna be the same process we draw a straight line out from the corner star and that'll take it right to the North Star so at this point you should have found the North Star now we can position our tripod and I just look for a nice clear horizon and then grab my tripod really push down on all the legs like this because very often what will happen is that you haven't locked down all your legs all the way and if you push down usually one will start to sink so you can get that all figured out now before it's cruises up later in the night also you want to make sure that the tripod is fairly level right now I'm kind of on an uneven surface it looks pretty good to me depending on your ball head you should have a bubble level on there which will help us more in a minute but I'm gonna lower this one leg just a little bit and so it looks level to my high and I think that looks a little bit better now is when we can attach our ball head to the tripod you might have already done so already but what I want to talk about next are the different options you can use with the move shoot move first let's talk about what I'm gonna be using and that's the Ben row ib2 ball head I cover this all in the gear module if you want to learn more but this is a good solid reliable ball head I can attach it to here then we can attach our tracker on top of this ball head however Mushu move does make their own accessories one of which being this base right here and this can actually really make your polar alignment much more precise because the way this works is we have a little panning knob which will move the base left and right and we have this will called the altitude knob that's going to move the star tracker up and down and if you get into the bigger star trackers this is essentially what we're going to be using and the main reason we use these again is because we can do very precise adjustments whereas with the ball head it's kind of you know not nearly as precise so I'm gonna put this on hold for right now we're gonna use a ball head because I'm assuming most of you will have that but we'll talk about this one later on the video so again I'm gonna grab a pretty big sturdy ball head here this is the Benro ib2 and just screw that on once my ball head is attached then I can grab my tracker and right now I have everything on a little Obon tripod hammock this is quickly becoming one of my favorite camera accessories because I can just leave everything right there I have to keep going back to the car or wherever this just keeps everything nice and organized so again if you want to learn more about that check out the gear section in the course here we have our move shoot move obviously and this is the goethe version that's how you say it but we're going to do now is just if you haven't done so already you need to put the tripod plate here on the bottom because by default there won't be one there but every ball head should come with a tripod light plate just screw it in there then we come out this on our ball head now that we've got the tracker on top we need to rotate this to face north as well so I can loosen my panning knob here that'll move it left and right and I know North's right up over there so I can just position it like so and that's good enough for right now we just need to get it facing more or less to the north and then we'll continue on from there now that we've got our star trekker on top of our ball head and we're facing north we can add our laser pointer and begin the polar alignment process so you should have gotten a little rectangular bracket where they got the laser pointer or the polar scope all we have to do is line it up tighten down the screw now it's attached then we're gonna grab our laser pointer and for those of you who don't have a laser pointer or maybe you live in a country where you can't get one that's unfortunate because it really does speed things up if you don't have the laser pointer you'll have to use the polar scope instead which I'll show you here in a minute but right now I'm just gonna show you my recommended technique so we're gonna get the laser pointer slide it in it's only gonna go in one way and then tighten down the other screw now we can turn it on point up in the North Star and pretty much finish our polar hem in about five or ten seconds but I want to caution you if you're in a pretty kerbin environment there's a lot of planes and things flying overhead or even out in the middle of the desert here we still have a lot of planes you don't want to be shining this all around so whenever possible leave the laser pointer turned off and just turn on very briefly and obviously don't shine anybody's eyes cuz I can really damage their eyesight so now we're gonna do is just aim the star tracker up pretty close to where the North Star should be then I'm gonna turn the laser pointer and then I'll do some little adjustments around my ball head until the laser is directly pointed at the North Star and once you've done that you've officially done your polar alignment that's all there is to it thankfully here with the move shoot move however if you're gonna be shooting 24 millimeters and up to 35 50 maybe 100 millimeters then this might not be precise enough in that case what we want to do is take out the laser pointer and grab our polar scope and for those of you who didn't have the laser pointer this is where we're gonna start off so we'll grab our polar scope and then slide it into the same little bracket when we look through the polar scope you're gonna notice that there's a reticle inside and this is the Sky Watcher reticle so if you have like a star adventure started venture mini it's the same polar scope basically well what I want you to do is crouch down and look through your polar scope and you should see 0 3 6 & 9 we need to line it up like a clock with 0 at the top and 6 at the bottom so I can loosen the screw again and then just turn the polar scope while I'm looking through it and get it all squared up and there we go now if you can't see there right akule then you'll want to make sure you have your headlamp P&E this is a very useful tool for our polar alignment process because when we turn this on you should have a red light function built-in to your headlamp and what I normally do is I just crouch down over the front of my polar scope and shine a light very quickly and from the front and when I do that I'm able to very quickly illuminate the reticle and see what I'm doing anyway once you've gotten the reticle lined up then we can continue on with our polar alignment process so for those of you who use the laser pointer like I demoed at this point you should see the North Star somewhere inside of that polar scope it's usually gonna be the biggest brightest star in there in most cases if you don't see a big bright star in there then I would take the polar scope out put the laser pointer back in and just make sure that you're still hanging it up to the same spot also now is a really good time to make sure that this ball head is locked down because I see this all the time where at the very end of this process people attach all their camera gear then the ball head comes loose from the tripod and they have to go all the way back to square one so you might as well do this at this stage really tighten down that ball head and make sure it's not going anywhere as well as the panning knob here cuz sometimes people don't take that down and the ball head will come loose so there we go then if you need to again putting a laser pointer repoint up at the North Star then once we have the polar scope back in here we can continue on so for this to work you are going to need an application on your smartphone I normally use the Sam console app this is a free download for both iPhone and Android once you have the star adventure or mini console app though we can open it up this was designed for another star tracker but it has everything we need for the move shoot move what I want you to do is go to the polar clock utility from here you should see the exact same reticle that we see in our polar scope which is awesome then we can click on location in the upper right and you just want to make sure it is pulling in your current latitude and longitude otherwise this won't work properly I want you see it's pulling in your correct location we'll go back now what we need to do is look again at that reticle and position the North Star exactly as we see it here in the app in this case the North Star is right about on the six o'clock marking on a reticle so now we need to position my ball head that way the North Star is exactly at the same spot however this is a problem I ran into last night that you're gonna encounter as well everything in this polar scope is upside-down and reversed so when you go to make your adjustments you're gonna think F to move the ball head one way but in reality it's going to be the complete opposite and this can be very difficult to work around because everything is just not going away you anticipate and that is one of the problems of using a ball head is that this is more difficult than it needs to be and that's where this little panning and tilting head will come in handy which I'll show you more about in a minute but what you want to do is crouch down look through the polar scope and then move your ball head and get the North Star as close as you can again in this case right about on the six o'clock marking and it's very possible at this stage that you'll lose the North Star entirely and not be able to find it if that happens to you just take out the polar scope grab your laser pointer put it in the hole turn it on and just make sure you're still angle up to where you need to be if not adjust your ball head then you can put back the polar scope so that's one of the nice things about using the move shoot move because with all the other star trackers if you lose your polar alignment good luck getting it back it can be very difficult especially if you're doing this in the middle of the night when there's a lot more stars out and as I mentioned before once you do a little bit adjustment lock everything down and in order to see the reticle you might have to grab that headlamp you look over the front hold it in front of you and just flash it back and forth and that allow do you see the reticle and the North Star at the same time once you've gone things as close as you can now we can attach our ball head and our camera turn on the tracker and begin shooting that's the basics of the polar alignment process next though I want to show you how to use the pan and tilt base instead because like I said this should help make your life a lot easier at night because rather than having to move the ball head entirely at the same time we can do just one axis at a time with this head okay I've gotten the panning and tilting head attached I want to make sure everything is nice and tight so it doesn't go anywhere you can see it came loose so I really wanted to torque this thing that way no it's secure on the base because if not I guarantee that's gonna come back to haunt you later on and the way I have my arca-swiss plate right now it's not gonna fill in here so I'm gonna have to loosen it turn it 90 degrees and then tighten it down and there we go now it will slide in properly like so and there's basically two knobs that we need to worry about here on the panning and tilting base there's what you might call our azimuth screw that's gonna move things left and right that's a smaller one here on the base so if I turn it I can now move left and right then the big guy here on the left that is our we'll call it the altitude knob that's going to move things up and down and if you look very closely you'll even see that there's some latitude markings that correspond to your current latitude so in this case I'm about 37 degrees north and I can dial that in here somewhat close but these are nowhere near precise markings it goes 3069 you in a very small amount of time so I would just use them as a very rough guideline but it's gonna be the same exact process that we saw with the ball head first we'll grab our laser pointer slide it in in the bracket and then we'll tighten that down then we'll use our altitude and azimuth knobs to move a tracker exactly where we need once the laser pointer is pointed up at Polaris we'll tighten everything down and then we can swap out for our polar scope align the reticle so it's sitting correctly double-check our app to make sure where we need to position it then we'll look through here and move it left and right up and down and I think that's really gonna help make things much easier using a ball head I've got a lot of experience using bases like this and only minimal experience using a ball and I can tell you it can be quite difficult and I want to stress here that if you're gonna be shooting 14 to 24 millimeters you don't have to be super precise if I can see the North Star somewhere inside the reticle even if I can get it that centered up in the crosshair that's good enough for what we're doing and you should be able to shoot 2 3 or 4 minutes even at 14 millimeters with a rough polar alignment but again if you're gonna be shooting 24 35 50 or higher then in that case you will want to attach the polar scope make sure you get as close as you can of the app and not allow you to shoot longer exposures with your lenses and before we go I want to make sure that I explain the polar alignment process like what we're actually doing that way you understand this so if you were to look up to the northern sky right next to the North Star that is the North celestial Pole that's where all the stars appear rotate around is that very specific spot the North Star itself is a little bit off-center from the North celestial pole that's why we're putting the North Star inside of that circle then the cross in the center that should be point precisely up to the North celestial pole where all the stars rotate around then when we turn on our star tracker here after we've attached all of our camera here the tracker is very slowly going to move our camera with the Stars and that's what ultimately allows us to shoot longer exposures with our camera now without any star trails so hopefully the polar alignment process makes a lot more sense now very simple if you're gonna be doing Milky Way photography with a wide-angle lens all you really have to do is attach your tracker to a ball head slide in the laser pointer turn it on move your ball head until it's pointing up to the North Star tighten everything down then you can come over here attach your camera which are on the tracker and start shooting it's really that simple however if you're gonna be shooting 35 millimeters and up or if you're in the southern hemisphere you'll also want to get the polar scope and now that you know how to use the polar scope you can do an even more precise polar alignment and shoot longer exposures without star trails so coming up in the following videos will look at how to properly attach all your camera gear we'll look at what camera settings to use and I'll just kind of walk you through exactly how it's everything up on a normal night you

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 66,251

Keywords: moveshootmove, gauda, star tracker, polar alignment, tutorial, milky way photography, astrophotography, how to do a polar alignment

Id: _kZBaLjHTW8

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020