Simple Polar Alignment Method for Southern Hemisphere

hello and thanks so much for tuning in I'd like to wish you all a great happy New Year and I know 2023 will be bring it for our nightscape shooting well you know today I want to take you on a journey of Discovery I want to show you my simple and very effective method of achieving accurate polar alignment here in the southern hemisphere but this is also relevant to the Northern Hemisphere and especially to those of us who struggle with seeing any stars at all in the poloscopes of star trackers now my journey started a few weeks ago when I hit the road and found myself at a very familiar location intending to shoot at a local Lake conditions weren't ideal with clouds hanging around but that's partly why I was actually out there testing a polar alignment method that doesn't rely on a clear view of the sky I've always been a bit of a gadget guy and the challenge of constructing simple props to assist with a common problem appeal to me therefore the woodwork idea the concept of polar alignment is quite simple indeed there is a point in the sky around which All of the Stars rotate due to the movement of the earth if we can locate this exact spot and mount our camera on a star tracker rotating at the same speed we can get very long exposures of the night sky with sharp pinpoint Stars so even though the concept is simple the application of these principles is not so easy so you can see my plan and it sounds pretty straightforward right well unfortunately that's not the full story okay so I've got my compass here which I'm going to place on top of this piece of wood and I'm looking for 180 degrees now I've mentioned this to you before but it does have the declination allowance here which says 10.8 degrees so this is working out that I have got 180 degrees which is due south and that's looking pretty good what I have to do is make sure that I can actually get this angle here correct in relation to my latitude okay so what I'm doing here is using an app called Velux to get the angle I'm looking for 36.5 degrees now you can see there it says 35.9 so let's just wind that back up 37 36 36 and a half and there we go now just tighten it down tighten it up and that should be fine okay so I'm taking my piece of wood away I've got my angles where I want them I'm going to replace it with the actual unit on that same Angle now it goes without saying that everything has to be locked down tight so my tripod legs have got to be nice and tight everything has to be level and I've got the base Bubble Level there secured I've got a good spread of this tripod it's a good solid tripod as well and now you can see I've got my star Adventurer facing exactly in the same direction that this piece of wood was facing a minute ago and now is the test I'm going to take some images I'll get my camera out and let's just see how we go I've been shooting here I've got Orion up there a fair bit of cloud cover has come across which is not great but I'm just checking some exposures here I've done some one minute and two minute and just then I got carried away and I don't know it went for about three or four minutes or something so I'll just have to see what that one looks like but I'm using a 50 millimeter lens here at the moment just to get myself started now I reckon if I can track with a 50mm lens using my alignment method then that's not going to be too much of a problem because I'll probably be using a 20 mil or even a 35 mil for most of my stuff so you know I don't think it'll be a problem but uh at those focal lengths so yeah there's a bit of cloud around which is frustrating me but it's fairly clear down there to the South uh it's about half past 10 and it's only just got dark oh well I'm shooting away out there successfully but I've had a few issues so I've decided I've just got to stop and have a Cuppa to gather my thoughts the first thing disaster that happened I dropped my phone and now you probably can't see that but I've only got half a screen I can't say anything on the phone oh dear right here so I can't do anything with the phone no Compass no apps no nothing I don't think I can even make a phone call with I can't see the bottom half of the screen so that means I need a biscuit I can tell you that I'm going to dunk this biscuit that's a nice biggie oh look these things happen it's all part of the game fair bit of cloud wafting through but you know sometimes I don't mind that because it gives you a bit more Ambience it sort of looks more realistic with some of these track shots as well so but because of the clouds I'm not doing a whole lot of stacked stuff I think I'll be mainly doing single exposures with the tracking so possibly one minute some of two minutes maybe but because the clouds are moving pretty quick it just blurs a lot of the clouds so the shorter shutter speed I think is a better option well at this point the clouds moved in and covered the sky completely I was able to shoot a couple of images from around that location with good results but I knew this adventure was only just getting started foreign [Music] you can see from this single 60 second exposure at 50 millimeter focal length tracking wasn't too bad the corners are nice and sharp so that was a good start but I wasn't finished with this experiment with polar alignment you know it's now three weeks since I started this journey of testing my simple methods to line up the South Celestial pole oh and yes I did have to buy a new phone here it is here so anyway these are the things we struggle with now for those of you who don't know the South Celestial poll is very difficult to find in the sky it's easy to get a rough alignment but I have always struggled to see anything through the built-in poloscopes of these tracking mounts if you follow my channel you'll know that I usually use the ipolar camera built into the ioptron sky guider Pro tracker and that's a really good system but I also want to be able to Polar align when there are obstacles or clouds hiding the view of the celestial pole hence my experiments so what I decided to do was compare how close I could get with my simple manual alignment method to a properly aligned setup with the eye polar so on my next adventure I put the two tripods side by side and proceeded to align them both to the South the eye polar is easy to use and once I had that one properly aligned I then went about setting up the other tripod with the star Adventurer now I'd been playing around a lot with some homemade bits and pieces to assist with this process as well as that I've been looking at some phone apps to see how accurate they can be I'm an Android phone user so it took me a while to find some apps that I felt might be actually useful for this it seems the industry standard phone alignment app is polar scope Align Pro but this is only available for iPhone users uh but after some searching I found that you can use Sky Safari 6 Plus which I already had on my phone for this use this is a wonderful app for a general night sky viewing but like most things takes a while to learn what it can do another Android app I've been testing is polar aligner Pro which is a little different but has a wonderful daytime alignment feature which lets you remember the polar alignment for the next time you want to check it so during my testing I was continually frustrated by the inconsistency I was getting with the phone compass apps one minute it showed us accurate reading and then it was a little bit off now I'm well aware of the influence of metal objects placed near a compass and that's why I made so much use of the Timber brackets in my testing I even bought an old analog comp us to try and help me find an accurate reading and this did actually help I made sure I had a declination scale on this one so I could make allowances for the difference between true north and magnetic north so if you're not aware of what true north and true South is I'll try to explain all compasses will point to what is known as magnetic north as this magnetic field is what makes a compass work in the first place but magnetic north for most locations on Earth can be quite a long way from True North and this angle between true north and magnetic north is known as the declination Angle now at my location this is about 11 degrees east so when my compass needle is pointing North I need to adjust the angle by 11 degrees to the east to find true north now True North is the actual poll around which the planet rotates and this in turn is the pole that we must align to to get accurate polar alignment for our tracking mounts I just wish this stuff wasn't so complicated but the good thing is that this difference between magnetic north and True North is really easy to find online just do a search for magnetic declination for your town or city okay so back to my experiments I did find that by using the old-fashioned analog Compass I was getting consistent readings and as I mentioned it does have a declination Skyliner which makes for easy adjustments for True North and South so at this point I've been out comparing the results from my eye polar aligned Mount to my simple compass and Timber block method they were close but not exactly accurate so I still wasn't quite there with my experiments but the good thing about having the two mounts side by side was that I was able to work out exactly where the alignment of each Mount was different hey I even placed markers on the ground and all around my garden in the backyard to try to replicate the correct alignment angle oh I'll tell you what the things we do eh now I did numerous test shots using my 50 millimeter lens and found with some fine tuning I was able to get really good eight minute exposures on my manual polar aligned Mount so this was looking really good as I never shoot that long in the real world with wide angle tracking anyway but the proof would be in my ability to replicate this at any location at any time without the luxury of the eye polar to get me out of trouble so over the course of the next couple of weeks I found myself out shooting lots of locations to perfect my methods but in the midst of this time I received a parcel in the mail which would change my mindset regarding this whole experiment this is what I received the sky Labs polar alignment adapter now this simple plastic device was developed by a New Zealand company called skylabes they specialize in helping people get into astronomy and astrophotography and offer an online store to enable this anyway this simple adapter came to my attention and after a conversation with a chap called Geordie from skylabs I thought it was worth a try to see if it might work well I tell you what this thing is so easy to use it's lightweight and simple all you do is place the adapter into the mount attach your phone into the cradle and fire up your preferred app in my case I've been using the Sky Safari app to show the north Celestial pole Yes you heard that right I'm facing the phone down into the ground to find the North Pole now up until this point I've been trying to face the phone up into the sky to see the South Celestial pole which you can actually do that but the problem is that you have to work out a way of accurately aligning and holding the phone in this orientation now that is not as easy as you may imagine now by the way there are other mounts that do this namely the move shoot move phone adapter but I've not tried to use that option so I can't really comment on its accuracy anyway as you can see from these images the process is quite simple to do out in the field and is working really well for me at the moment now I am going to show you some images in a minute of what I've achieved with this method but before I do that I want to run you through the steps you need to make the Sky Safari 6 Plus app work with this polar aligning application and then I'm going to run you through how I calibrate my phone compass and use a simple Bubble Level and my analog Compass out on location so firstly when you open the Sky Safari 6 Plus app you'll have to make some changes to the settings so click on settings make sure the time and data correct for your location choose current location go to Horizon and Sky show Horizon and Sky click on as transparent with line go to grids and reference show grid with equatorial coordinates down to reference points show Celestial polls now a very important setting is found down on the bottom line of the menus on the main screen click on observe then scope display go down to field of view display options and make sure the crosshairs are ticked under that you have to tick the show even if not connected to telescope option now there are variable options in the menu of this app but these are the ones I find to be important for what we're doing here to get the app to actually show the celestial poles with the crosshairs in real time all we need to do is activate the compass icon on the bottom menu on the front screen all right so now we have the app working as it should another really important step is to calibrate the phone Compass to give an accurate reading now this is really important and shouldn't be overlooked simply rotate the phone in a figure eight pattern a few times in fact a lot of compass apps including photo pills will ask you to do this anyway it really does make a difference and believe me I've done this plenty of times out there okay so here is my step-by-step method when on location I set up the tripod and get it as little as I possibly can by using a simple two-way Bubble Level I actually don't trust the single ball type levels built into tripods using my analog Compass I find a true South hitting roughly remember I'm taking into account the declination variation which for me is about 11 degrees from there before I mount the tracker on its base I place the skylab's phone adapter onto the base then I enable the Sky Safari app and adjust both the Azimuth and the altitude to line up the opposite Celestial pole depending on which hemisphere I'm in this is easy and pain-free as you don't have to bend down to try to look up the pole from a low angle okay so then I'll Mount the star tracker and my lens and start shooting now it goes without saying that you need a good solid tripod base to use a star tracker oh and make sure you don't kick the tripod legs we've all done that while we're out there in the dark that's where the glow-in-the-dark tape comes in really handy just last night I was getting consistent five minute tract exposures using my 85 millimeter lens with this method so I'm absolutely wrapped in that outcome as I mentioned most of my tract exposures are only up to about two minutes so a slight variation in alignment with a wide angle lens on a mount like this won't be a problem this method is certainly not intended for deep space photography with long lenses but I reckon it's a great way to get excellent results with the equipment that I use especially down here in the southern hemisphere so here are some images I've shot these past few weeks you using these methods for Polar alignment I hope you enjoy them [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] so there you go I'll tell you what if you're like me and you can never see anything resemblings the octan's constellation in a tracker's poloscope then maybe try this simple southern hemisphere polar alignment method that for me has been working in absolute treat and as always I'll be really Keen to read your comments down below this video anyway this is the end of 2022 and I'm so looking forward to more exciting adventures during the coming year I want to wish you all a wonderful new year with clear skies and wonderful night skate photography so I'll look forward to seeing you in the next video you take care [Music] foreign

Channel: Nightscape Images

Views: 25,789

Keywords: nightscape images, nightscape photography, milky way photography, astro timelapse settings, astrophotography, light painting photography, light painting, richard tatti nightscape images, richard tatti photography, night photography settings, night photography tips and tricks, Milky way panorama, star tracker, sky watcher star adventurer, sky safari 6 plus, polar aligner pro app, skylabs new zealand, polar alignment southern hemisphere, simple polar alignment

Id: _5YdzcEIhks

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2022