Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer - Polar Alignment Tutorial

in order to get the best possible results out of your star tracker you always need to do a polar alignment each night and the more accurate your polar alignment is the longer you'll be able to shoot without star trails in this video we're going to break down the full polar alignment process for those of you shooting in the northern hemisphere and we're going to try and get through as much as we can and in the following videos we'll break this down even further and really tie it all together but the main concept for a polar alignment is simply that we want to put the star tracker facing towards either the North or the South Pole depending on our hemisphere because that's ultimately where all the stars tend to rotate around is that North Pole I mean ultimately it's the earth rotating but as far as we're concerned the stars are moving overhead so once we find the North Pole and we angle our star tracker up to that exact same spot we can attach our camera and now the camera mount is going to move just like the stars are moving and that's what ultimately gives us our sharp stars and what I want to shoot right now is this star trails video and what you're seeing is what I've just described where we have the North Pole in the very center of the frame and that's our center of rotation all the stars are moving around that central point and ultimately it's always our goal to position our star tracker exactly to that precise point now to do that we have a few tools here to help us out first we have the polar scope that's built in to the star adventure that's just gonna help us zoom in and find the North Star we'll get to that more in a minute we also have the latitude base which is going to help angle us up at the correct angle for the North Pole with all that in mind there's really just three simple steps you have to follow and to be honest when I get on location I can usually do my polar alignment in about 3 minutes or less so it's very simple once you understand the basics now I want to go through the steps one by one and then we'll bring it all together step one is to find north because we're trying to find the North Pole so to find north you can do this a variety of ways but for me the easiest is always to find the Big Dipper the Big Dipper is probably the most recognizable constellation and it's always in the northern portion of the sky so it's kind of a good landmark if you're out at night and looking for some stars just look around until you see the Big Dipper and now you know you're facing north once you've found the Big Dipper we can use that to identify the North Star which is more or less right by the North Pole so what I like to do is to try straight line out from the corner the Big Dipper and they'll take me directly to the North Star in most cases once I found the North Star itself also known as Polaris I can reposition my tripod so I'm facing as close to that point as possible that's step one again just find North and the North Star you can also use an application to do this as well let's say you want to use an app Stellarium this is a fantastic application for learning the night sky and even it even has a function where you can turn your phone on and once your phone has been enabled you can point the phone around in any direction and see which stars you're looking at and also what direction so this can help you very quickly find north as well as the North Star if you're a little bit confused there's also another great application out there called star walk - and frankly I'd recommend this one more for beginners because it will very clearly show you all the star names and even the constellations this is one of my favorite ways to learn the night sky if I'm out and I'm still learning the star names definitely recommend star walk to and that's certainly both of these apps Stellarium and star walk 2 will do the same thing you can click a button you can move your phone around in real-time and see which direction you're facing however you want to do this process whether you're using the Big Dipper to help you find the North Star or if you're using an app once you've reposition your tripod so you're facing north you've just finished step one step two is to dial in the correct latitude here on our base and for that we're gonna use a free app called the Sam console app the same console app was actually built for the little brother here of the adventure that's the star Adventure Mini and with that star tracker it's completely controlled by a smartphone so it's kind of cool but we can use that same app here on the adventure just as a side note you can't actually control the adventure with it but it still has it still has some nifty features for us so once you've downloaded and installed the star adventure mini console also known as the Sam console app I want to go down to the polar clock utility and here we can see the polar scope reticle that's actually built into our star adventure so that's going to be a nifty thing we're gonna look at later on but all I care about right now is the location in the upper right hand corner if you turn it on to use your location sensor it should automatically tell you your latitude and longitude in this case I'm at about 33 degrees north once I know that number I can just dial that in here on the base very easily so I'll loosen my screw here and just turn this until I'm as close as possible with 33 and then tighten everything down at this point my sorry adventure should be angled up to the same spot as at North Pole or that rotation axis that's step two step three is very simple all we have to do is just double check the bubble level on our base here and make sure it's dead center if our bubble level is a little bit off we'll adjust our tripod legs until we get it right in the middle and then I like to just push down on the tripod and make sure now the twist locks come loose or we don't sink into the ground a little bit and that's all you have to do for a rough polar I'm three simple steps find north dial in your latitude and make sure your tripod is flat and level and really that's all I do when I get on location if I'm using wide-angle lens and I've been able to shoot up to four minute long exposures at 14 millimeters doing this process if you want to get a little bit more precise though or if you're using a telephoto lens you're going to need to use the polar scope built into the adventure so why don't we take off the caps and take a look at that next what I want you to do now is come around the back of your adventure and then look through the polar scope and we should see our reticle inside there the first thing we need to do is make it so we have it lined up properly with zero at the top and six at the bottom so I'm gonna loosen the clutch here on the front of my adventure then I can rotate this front piece around until my polar scope is aligned properly against here at the top six at the bottom and then I want to tighten my clutch back down that's the first part of our precise polar alignment is just to get everything lined up properly next we can go back to the Sam console app and look at our polar clock utility that's really going to come in handy for us so I'll go back and what you want to look for right now and the polar clock utility is a little gray dot somewhere on the edge of that reticle that's where we need to position Polaris and there's a really cool feature that I want to explain what's going on here so you know how we have the reticle here and it's got crosshairs in the dead center what we're actually trying to do is put the north pole directly in the center of those crosshairs not the North Star because ultimately remember everything's rotating around that North Pole so that's always our goal is to get that dead centered but since the North Star isn't directly in the North Pole we're gonna offset it a little bit we just need to know where to offset it and thankfully they built the reticle so it's within that range so all we have to do at this point is find that gray dot and then come back around on our polar scope and look through there we should be able to see the North Star somewhere inside of our polar scope reticle once we do we're going to use our altitude and our azimuth adjustment knobs to either move the Northstar left or right up or down inside the polar scope until it matches what we just saw in the app now this is really where most people have the most problems you know they look through here either a they don't see any stars at all or B when they look through there they see multiple stars and they're not sure which one is our star so want to break down some different ways that can really help you out at this stage the best way if you're having trouble at this point is to always do your polar alignment during Twilight if possible because again only the brightest stars will be visible and that includes the Big Dipper as well as the North Star therefore when you look through the polar scope during Twilight it should only show you the North sorry if you've got it angled correctly including your latitude you just made sure you're facing north as close as possible that would be my biggest recommendation if you don't see any stars at all it's possible either your polar scope isn't focused properly or you're just not angled to the right location so what I'd recommend for that is just to crouch down here behind the adventure and make sure you can see the North Star somewhere over the top of the adventure provides you can see Polaris over the top you should be more or less aligned and you should be able to see it through the polar scope anyway once you've found the North Star somewhere in the polar scope again we're gonna use our altitude and azimuth adjustment knobs to get it precisely positioned as we saw in the Sam console app and this is something I don't even try you know let's say you don't see the North Star in there maybe it's just slightly out of the frame so we can use our azimuth adjustment knobs and move our entire thing left or right very slightly or user altitude adjustment knob to maybe move everything up or down slightly inside the polar scope and once you do that you might see the north star suddenly drift into the frame and then from there you can do your proper polar alignment now I just want to recap the basics of our azimuth and altitude adjustments so our azimuth adjustments on the front here these are the two screws and turn them both in the same direction at the same time and that's how they're going to move the North Star left or right inside of our polar scope this won't go very far though you've got a limited degree of rotation so you can't rotate the entire base around so you want to make sure as close as possible and that's her azimuth adjustment again left and right altitude the big knob here on the back that's gonna move ultimately the entire star tracker up or down but it will move the Northstar inside of our polar scope up and down as well once you've gotten the Northstar as close as possible to that same spot that we saw in the Sam console app we've just done our precise polar alignment and we should now be facing as close as possible to the North Pole once we've done that we want to make sure we don't touch anything from this point on we don't want to knock the tripod over a little bit we don't want to accidentally loosen the base or anything else because if you went through all that work to do a precise polar alignment and we move anything it's going to completely throw it all off so once we've done all that we can rotate our clutch and make sure we're facing up and down again then we can attach our camera and our ball head now we can start shooting you one last thing I wanna mention before I forget is the puller finder illuminator this is a little piece that should have come with your star adventurer and the way this works is that once you install the watch battery you can just pop this right into the front of your polar scope hole and now this is going to illuminate the reticle inside of your polar scope so if you're shooting the middle tonight you can't see the reticle at all you can just put this on here crank up the brightness a little bit and now you'll have a red light that will help you do your polar alignment process hopefully now a polar alignment process it makes a lot more sense ultimately all we're trying to do is angle the star adventure and point it up exactly to the North Pole which is the center of rotation that way when our camera mount rotates its rotating in the same way as a North Pole and ultimately removing that star motion if you're still a little bit overwhelmed by the polar alignment process you can always watch the following videos where we continue to break this down step-by-step and I think by the end of the little mini series here on your polar scope alignment you should have much more confidence the next time you head out in the field I think with a little bit of practice you'll be able to start doing this yourself within a few minutes and overall start capturing a lot better images at night you

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 125,366

Keywords: skywatcher, star adventurer, polar alignment, sky guider, star tracker, polar scope, tutorial, astrophotography, star adventure, star adventurer mini, sky-watcher, photography, skytracker, polarie, polaris, north star, big dipper, northern hemisphere, azimuth, altitude

Id: 5Yk-Zm4FT7w

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2019