[Music] so i'm going to show you how i set up my
skywatcher heq5 mount. i need a nice firm level hard surface to mount it on. spread the legs
out as wide as we can and align that peg with the north as best we can. use a compass for that or
if you know where polaris is you can use polaris. then use a spirit level across two of the joints
and adjust one of the two legs in order to get the spirit level bubble in the middle. once
that's done return the spirit level 90 degrees and adjust the third leg until that is level and
once that's done the top of your amount is level. next step is to fit the mount head. gently put that on and just take the slack off
of the azimuth bolts. now we're going to fit the securing plate which goes up through the the
hole in the bottom and has a spreader plate on it to push the legs apart from one another. do up
the main axis of it first tightening the hand screw at the top and then tighten the bottom one.
you will feel some shifting and jerking in the mount as you tighten this bottom one that's okay.
just take the slack out of those azimuth bolts. you can see that the azimuth bolts
rotate the mount in a horizontal plane. now we're going to adjust the elevation
bolts to get the graticule pointing roughly to our latitude. you have to turn these
in an opposing way to one another so you would tighten one whilst loosening the other and vice
versa just as you do with the azimuth bolts. i live at 51 degrees latitude so here i'm
adjusting the graticule to get to about 51 degrees. just needs to be accurate enough so
you can see polaris when you look up through the telescope. once you reach the right
position take out any slack in the bolts. now we drop the counterweight bar and lock that
off and remove the button from the end of the bar so that we can fit the counterweights.
you may need one or two counterweights depending on how much equipment you're going to
be carrying. be careful to do up the thumb screw firmly on these weights because you've not got
the protective button in the end at this point. you don't want it falling out and squashing
your toes. think about where you position the thumb screws because you don't want them
to snag on cables. and at the earliest opportunity get that button refitted to the end
of the counterweight bar to protect your toes. now i'm fitting the handset, so plug that
into the mount and insert the handset into the carry bracket. i have a usb cable on
mine. now i'm fitting the telescope so just do an approximate positioning, not balanced at
this point but we'll just fit the telescope. tightening the two clutches
to make sure it doesn't fall. and now it's time to fit the rest of
the cables. we've got the power cables, camera cable, various dew heater cables and motor
focus control cables. there's also a cable to the base of the telescope for a fan that blows air
up through the telescope. once your cables are all fitted... i have a dew shield to fit. i put
a neoprene dew shield on the end of my telescope that can have a significant effect on balance
so that should be in place as well before you balance. basically once everything's set up you
can balance the telescope. start with the RA. undo the RA clutch and see what the balance is
like. here we're telescope heavy so we need to move the two counterweights down the bar until we
achieve a better balance and lock them off again. now we've got a nice balance on the RA. now
we turn our attention to the declination. so undo the declination clutch with the RA
in the horizontal position. you can see here that the telescope is bottom heavy...
particularly if i turn it horizontal you'll see that the bottom of the telescope is falling so
the telescope needs to be moved up in the mount. it's important to return to roughly
to the home position at this point, as you see there, and then move the telescope so
that you don't stress the drive gears particularly on the RA. so i've shifted that and then i'll take
it back into this position and lock the RA clutch and see if that's better... and it's still tail
heavy so we'll go back to the home position again and shift the telescope up on the dovetail
plate a little bit more... tighten it off again ...and test the balance once more. looking
much better now, and we test it in the vertical position as well. if it's out here you
need to twist the telescope within its rings. ...and return to the home position.
so that's all nicely balanced now now we'll take the cover off the
front and the back of the polar scope and perform the polar alignment, and i've
done a separate tutorial on polar alignment so i'm not going to cover that here. it's
important to turn the deck to open up the hole so the polar scope can see through
the mount to do your polar alignment. so this is the point of which
you would switch to the other tutorial if you want to know how
to perform the Polar alignment. once your polar alignment is complete, replace
the covers on both ends of the polar scope. ...and now it's time to put the telescope and
the mount in to the home position in a more accurate way so do this first by turning the RA
to a horizontal position and getting a spirit level place it on the body of the mount and then
adjust the RA until the spirit level bubble is in the middle, and then adjust the graticule on the
RA to 12 o'clock. i don't tighten the thumb screw at that point... and then i turn the RA 90 degrees
by turning from 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock. once it's at 6 o'clock i lock off the RA. now we do the
Declination part. so we put the spirit level on the telescope. this time undo the Dec clutch
and adjust until the bubble's in the middle. lock off the Dec clutch and now remove the spirit
level and adjust the graticule to zero degrees, undo the thumb screws, set it to zero
and tighten them up again this time. now we can undo the Dec clutch and rotate the
Dec of the telescope round to 90 degrees... ...and lock the deck clutch. and that's now
in the home position much more accurately. so when the mount initializes you get an
initializing message and that's shortly followed by the synscan and the version number that's your
firmware version that's loaded into the handset, so you just press enter to clear that and then
you get a warning about 'never use your telescope to point directly at the sun' then press enter
again and you're asked to set your longitude. now you've got west flashing here with the two arrows
in the bottom corners you can toggle between east and west and then you can press the right arrow
here and change the digits if you wish to say with the right arrow left arrow to move the
cursor just type in the digits that you want and when you're happy with it your
longitude is set correctly press enter. same principle with the latitude. if you're just
happy with what it says just press enter and it skips that entry or accepts it and then it's
got the time zone. same principle for editing the time zone how many hours shifted from
GMT you are, Enter. then your elevation. you can look up your elevation using various
online apps or phone apps entered in meters and then there's the date. now be careful with the
date it's month day year is the format it wants, not day month year. it's easy to get that wrong so
i'm going to put in 07 26 2020 for example, enter and then the time maybe twenty two zero zero and
now enter something that's maybe ten seconds or so after the current time so you've got time to look
at your clock accurate clock and then wait for exactly the moment that the time you've entered
arrives and at that moment press enter and that gives you as good a synchronization as you need
between the actual time and what's entered in the mount. it then shows you the time clocking away
so you can check you've done a decent job of that. press enter and it asks you if you're in daylight
saving so again the bottom two arrows you can toggle between yes and no and then hit enter and
now it gives you information about where polaris should be in the polar scope. now for me i've
already polar aligned at this point and i don't use this information. if you want to use this
information just to do your polar line you can but so you press enter twice to get through that
now ask you begin alignment question mark yes or no this is about star alignment so if you say yes
to this you'll then be using the handset to do a star alignment if you say no then obviously it
won't do that star alignment but if you want to control your telescope mount from a laptop using
something like stellarium scope then you may wish to do your star alignment from there and not do it
from the mount in which case you would choose to no so i'm going to choose that for a moment
i'll come back in a minute and show how to do the star alignment using the handset i'm going
to press the down arrow to go to utility function press enter and then hit down arrow until i see direct mode and then hit enter so now the mount
is set up for being controlled by a laptop through that usb connector but i'm not going
to do that i'm not going to go press escape to take myself back up through the menus no longer
in pc direct mode and go back to the setup hit enter and then scroll through until i get back to
alignment and hit enter so if i'd have said yes to uh begin alignment uh or one actually just to
begin alignment it would have brought me to this menu so uh you can then choose whether you
want to do a one or two or three star alignment if you're just going to look in one local area
of the sky it's fine to do a one star alignment so long as you choose a style that's reasonably
close to where you're going to be observing or photographing if you're going to be looking at a
number of different places across the sky may be better to do two or even three star alignment to
get a better mapping of the sky over a wider area but for the purposes of
demonstration i'm just going to show a one star a line and if you do a two or three
you're basically following the same process but on two or three different styles instead of
just one so i'll choose a one star align and press enter now it's suggesting arcturus as this as the
star you don't have to use the star it suggests you can use stellarium or similar software to
check what bright star is going to be visible right now from your mount allowing for all the
different obstructions like trees and houses and pick a star that's reasonably close to where
you're going to be observing so let's assume uh we don't want to use arcturus we want to use vega
so i've hit the down arrow and switch to vega then i hit enter and now the mount is slewing to
point to vega and once it completes the slew it will then ask you to center the telescope
view on vega and that's done manually by either looking at photos being taken repeatedly
or with the camera or by looking through the eyepiece so we'll just wait for the slew to
finish that's just stopping now now in order to move the scope once it finishes that's just
finished use arrow buttons center to eyepiece so we're going to use these four buttons here to
adjust where the star is in the field of view but the rate at which it shifts when we press this
buttons is controllable so you can choose your rate may be a good idea to start with rate six for
example and you just hit rate and then the number and now that sets the speed now that six is a
sort of medium speed if you want to go really fast maybe choose eight rate eight now you can hear
it's uh quite a rapid movement that's really quite fast once you get reasonably close maybe choose
something like rate five and make your fine tune adjustment so you've got ra and deck adjustments
on there now once your star is nice and centered in your field of view hit enter now because this
was a one star align it's now saying alignment successful and that's basically the star alignment
completed if it was a two star line it would now be getting you to choose your second star and you
go through the same process with the second star so the alignment star alignment is complete
and we're now ready to go and explore the sky so we can hit escape to get us back up through
the menus up to the top and now we can press object and we can choose what we want to look
at let's say we wanted to go and look at jupiter we would select solar system we can choose other
things such as Messier objects NGC, IC etc but we'll choose solar system hit enter and then
scroll through the planets mercury, venus, mars, jupiter. found the object we want and press enter
and it tells us the current out as of that object press enter again view object question mark
press enter again and now the telescope will slew to the object and that's it's as simple as
that once you're all set up to choose an object from the catalog built into the handset
and slew to it. i hope you found this useful check out my other tutorial if you want to know
more about the polar alignment see you next time!
