Telescope Setup, Polar Alignment, and Use for Beginners

hello stargazers I'm Heath the Astro tour guide welcome to my show on today's episode we're going to talk about these equatorial mounted telescopes all about how to set them up and use them the very common for beginners and they're also very frustrating sometimes they're a little bit different to use than a standard camera mount called an alt azimuth where you just point side to side and up and down and it's easy to find things these give beginners a little bit of trouble some places have even called them hobby killers but they don't have to be and today we're going to talk about how to set them up and how to use them so let's get started so one of the first things that are setting this telescope up that you need to do is to get your finder sight either a red dot finder or finder scope if you actually have a scope for that aligned with their telescope so that when you move it around and you use that thing as it's designed to get you pointed in the right general direction that's actually pointed where the telescopes pointed that can be very confusing and a lot of people don't never do that and luckily the easy and best time to actually do that is during the day so the first step that you want to do is to take your telescope and get an eyepiece in would demonstrating this inside today just for lighting and ease of recording but you'd actually probably go outside although I guess you could do this through a window as well but you're going to put an eyepiece in your telescope and obviously take the lens cap off and then you want to loosen the mounts and find something off in the distance with your telescope something small that's far enough away that you can make it tiny usually people will use the top of a light pole I like to use the very tip of a light out on my street and so you'll take the telescope and lock it in use your slow motion controls and here's a little tip as well you see when I get this that the eyepiece isn't very for turnin you can loosen the rings on your cradle and spend these Newtonian telescopes around so you get a comfortable viewing angle so then you're gonna take the eyepiece and use your controls and you're gonna Center that a light or tree branch or whatever you have and get it right in the center of your telescope and the reason it's good to do this during the day is a it's easy to find stuff and be you want to have something that's not moving in the night Scott everything's moving as the Earth spins so it's really easier to do this during the day get a light polish something centered up you can turn on your web doc finder and get that lined up with what you're seeing outside so you come out here and line it up and use your knobs to move the red dot around so that whatever you've got centered in your eyepiece you can also have centered right up in your red dot and that makes it so that these are perfectly aligned and then when you go out in the night and you're trying to find things you know that when you put your red dot on it that when you come up to the eyepiece it's going to be close to the center so that's step one and once you've got your red dot finder or finder scope aligned the next thing that you're going to want to do to use this is to actually take the telescope and take it outside and put it on the porch or if you're setting up at a remote site take it out of the car first and get this thing out in the ambient air it needs to equalize so that your primary the thick glass in your primary objective has time to cool and come to the ambient temperature outside until that happens the heat from the objective will make those rolling air currents like when you're looking at hot pavement on a summer day and you can see the waves coming off of it those currents will go through the tube of your telescope and make what you're looking at blurry and shifty and we don't want that so the first thing after we've got our finder scope aligned and we're ready to go out and view for the evening we're going to take our telescope out and let it equalize to ambient temperature twenty thirty minutes is usually sufficient if you have a catadioptric telescope at gossamer or a maxi tov then you'll want to take it a little bit longer those are fully enclosed and they take a little bit longer maybe an hour d-class but a good idea to do that so next thing we're going to do is we're going to take our tripod and we're going to go out we're going to set it up on the ground and that may sound silly but my point here that I'm making is you don't want to set this up if you have a deck outside or something that wobbles what happens is when you walk across the deck or other people come and walk you'll feel it shake and you'll see it in the eyepiece particularly high magnifications it'll vibrate so if you've got wooden decks and whatnot go out and find a good spot of Earth to do that the next thing you want to do is to take your tripod and level it and this is important for an equatorial mounted telescope because if this is shifted off level at all then when the telescope spins and tries to mimic the turn of the earth it'll be off kilter and so it'll slowly get off and the whole purpose of having this mount is so that when you turn the right ascension that your telescope will follow the star so we want to get this thing level first and foremost and there's a really easy way to do that I see beginners a lot of times when they try to level these they adjust each leg and you've got three and so when you change the setting on one it makes the other to go off and they'll be fighting all three legs trying to find that perfect balance and really there's an easy way to do it and what I like to do is take one leg doesn't matter on this style of telescope because it spins all the way around but yours may have mounts in the back of it with two screws where it matters which way points north if it does it'll have a little north on there if that's the case point the north side north otherwise I just like to take one leg and point it to the north then what I do is I take my torpedo level and lay it across the back two legs perpendicular to my single North Point leg now what I can do is take the legs and adjust them so that my level shows that it's level on this axis and now all I have to do is turn it 90 degrees where it's laying across the North pointing leg and I can adjust that one like so you only have to adjust two legs instead of fighting all three of them when you break it down into two axes that are 90 degrees from one another then you can just make two adjustments and once you do that and you get it level across the back legs and the front legs you can turn it any way around and it will be level all the way around so it's two simple adjustments instead of fighting all three legs once you've got your tripod level now we're ready to place them out on the tripod now for ease I've bought this mount and I still have the counterweight bar on the counterweight sitting on it but if you're transporting this you're probably going to unscrew this and put these on one of the time but we're going to set this thing in and get it screwed on and you will notice that the angled part that points up this is the right ascension axis I've got it pointing to the north area because this is what we're gonna have this line right here needs to be pointing right at the celestial pole the North Star if you live in the north the South celestial pole if you live down south and unfortunately because I live in the north and I think most of my viewers also do I'm not going to get into how to find the south pole honestly I'm not that great at it anyway so we're just going to talk about the north pole today and keep it north centric and I'll apologize to any friends from Australia that are watching this but you want this to point to the north and then during the day even before you go out one of the things that you can do is to loosen this nut on the altitude adjustment and then you'll see that there's a little scale here that has degrees of latitude on it and what you want to do is find out your latitude for the location that you're going to be observing it if you don't know what that is a really quick hack is to open the compass app on an iPhone or an iPad and in the compass app you'll see that it shows your degrees of latitude and longitude I'm sure there's something similar on an Android but I'm not sure because I'm not an Android guy but another thing if you can't find that on Android is just to open Google Maps and drop a pin at your observing location so open a satellite view drop a pin down and when you put a pin down you'll look down and you'll see that it will give the coordinates for that pin that you just dropped and that'll tell you your degrees of latitude that's the ones that are north and south so take the number from the north and south latitude here in Florida I'm at about 18 and so you can just Dow this adjustment knob until you see that it's roughly at the degrees of latitude that you have and that's going to get you close to where you need to be now the azimuth and altitude adjustments I'm not going to tighten these down yet because when we first start what we're going to do is we're going to use those instead of the standard clutches and slow motion controls to get our mount adjusted so the next step we've cooled off our telescope we've aligned our finder scope and we've got our tripod level and our I'm out placed onto the tripod is to bring out your telescope and attach it back to the mount and once we get it attached we're going to want to balance this so we'll show you how to do that next so once we've gotten our finder scope aligned we've got our telescope out and cooling down and we've gotten our tripod leveled and our mount attached to it we bring our telescope out and place it into the assembly and we want to balance it and the way that we do that is I'm going to turn this sideways so that you can see when we get our telescope and everything attached we're going to come out and we're going to adjust this counterweight so that when I move it around when I move the telescope around when I stop it's not following or climbing you can see that when I let go right here the telescope's shift in just a little bit that tells me that I need a little less weight on the counterweight side the way to get less weight is just to slide it in slightly now when I place it in different positions the telescope isn't going to want to move and change positions so it's balanced around the right ascension axis the next thing we want to do is balance the telescope on its declination axis which is this way so I decide so we're going to put it sideways and again with all of our observing equipment on our eyepieces and all the weight about the way that we're going to have it that night while we're observing I'm gonna check the telescope and make sure that when I move it from one place in the other that it's not dropping or rising and I will show you this was balanced now but if it were out of balance when you first put it in maybe I would have it like this and all of a sudden it wants to fall it's a little bit out of balance so you just loosen the Rings and do what I just did you just slide it until it's to the point where it's in balance from side to side now we have a telescope that's in balance now I just tighten these rings just enough that it's not gonna slide out but I'm gonna leave them a little loose and you'll see why in just a moment okay so now we have a tripod that's level our mount is roughly pointed at the right latitude and our telescopes balanced the next step that we want to take is to polar align our telescope so we need to start with the telescope in what's called the home position and really the right ascension around the axis doesn't matter because when you're pointed at the pole then it should not change anywhere that it moves around this because that point doesn't change but I like to put it up on top where it's just easy to get to but what does matter is your declination you have a scale on there and you want to make sure that your telescope is pointed straight at 90 degrees and assuming that you're setting circle is correct when you put that on 90 degrees it should be perfectly straight with the right ascension axis and then we want to lock in both the clutches once we get to that point so that the telescope doesn't move on the mount it's locked in and now we're gonna align it to the polar axis and the way we'll do that is we'll turn on our finder site if you have a red dot or tail red or just look through your finder scope if you have a scope and you're going to spot the North Star now finding your star can be something new if you've just beginning in astronomy but there's an easy way to do it what you want to do is before you go out use your iPad or iPhone if you have planetarium software on those or go into the software that I like to use which I'll show now is stellarium we're going to go on stellarium and we're going to enter the location that we're going to be observing from and the time that we expect to be going out and see where the Big Dipper is in the night sky at that point of the night because you want to see the orientation depending on the time of year and the time that you're going out it could be down at the bottom pointed up or it could be upside down facing down so you want to see what you're going to be looking for and then you want to go out and spot the Big Dipper in the North sky when you find that Big Dipper the two stars on the end of the Big Dipper point right to the North Star so you find that find the line that goes from those and that'll find the North Star contrary to urban legend is not the brightest star in the sky but it is bright enough that you can usually spot it even in moderate light pollution so we spot the North Star and then we're going to take our telescope and find the North Star in the finder and we're gonna make adjustments using the mount itself we're going to turn that mount from side to side until it's lined up with it and then we're going to use the altitude adjustment on that scale it should be close because we preset it remember Terra latitude so we'll tweak it and move it up and down until our finder is right on the North Star and then we'll confirm it in there our piece and again do any minor movements that we need to do left or right or up or down until the North Star is centered in your telescope in the home position once you've got it centered in congratulations your polar aligned now what that means is we can tighten down the nuts that adjust it or mount the altitude in the azimuth knobs and now we're only gonna move our scope using the controls that were designed for the scope now a very common thing is this is a little awkward and so people get frustrated if they want to see something over here and they can't quite figure out how to get that scope in it takes a little practice in using these adjustments to get it where you want it but he'll release the clutches and without moving the telescope mount or the tripod you only want to let the telescope move using the axes on the equatorial mount to find that thing that you're looking for and once you do and you get it in your finder scope then you'll lock your clutches and once you get the clutches locked you can use your slow motion controls to fine-tune it get the area of the sky in the finder scope and then use your eyepiece and use your slow motion controls to get it adjusted and that's the key part is you don't want to move this you don't want to pick it up and turn it around to the different points because now that you've got this set the beauty of this design is that only spinning the right ascension control the slow motion knob you can follow things as they move in the night sky so once you get this thing zoomed in and white where you want it then you can just use that one slow motion control or if you have a motor drive even better on your control then once you get it centered if this is properly polar aligned then it'll just follow it in the sky and you don't have to do anything but make that one minor adjustment you're not having to do like on an alt azimuth where you have to go up and decide or down into the side making multiple movements that can be tricky particularly in high magnifications and that's what we're avoiding with the equatorial mount a telescope now a pro tip once you've got this fully polar aligned on your right ascension axis you'll have setting circles and this one actually moves and so what you can do is Center the telescope on a bright star that you know that you can find you can use your planetarium software and find whatever's out there that you know the position of the sky and you look over you say okay that one's called Vega and when you hit the information for that star you'll see the right ascension for Vega then you can take this setting circle and dial it over and set it to the actual right ascension for that known star that you're pointing at and from that point on when you turn this through the night you can use these setting circles to find other things so if you're looking for a faint galaxy or something and you're still not that great at finding it you can look up the declination and right ascension and you can use these setting circles to actually turn the telescope and point it right to an object of a known location the only other thing to a watch is with these equatorial mounts depending on what you're looking at particularly when things are hot at the zenith straight over your head you can get into positions where your telescope wants to bump in to your stand and what happens is you get over here and you're looking at this thing where the stand gets in the way and you'll notice that my weight is higher than the telescope itself this is an awkward position but all you have to do is what's called a Meridian flip you can still get to that object but you just want to bring the telescope and flip it around the other way and all of a sudden you're pointed at that same spot and now you can continue to track it through the night sky and your telescopes coming over the top again and not in the way those are really the tricks to using an equatorial mount telescope it's not that hard once you learn how to get this lined up properly and let it follow the night sky and do the work that it was meant to do it's a good design it just takes a little getting used to so I hope this has been helpful if you liked the video hit the like button hit the subscribe the next episode we're going to be talking about how to find some actual cool things in the sky and put this baby to use thanks for watching I'll see you next time and specifically I hate that we have a telescope that is reasonably in balance but I thought it was seriously and we're going to talk about all [Music]

Channel: Astro Tourguide

Views: 59,223

Keywords: Telescope Setup, Telescope Polar Alignment, Telescope Basics, Telescope for Beginners, Setting up a Telescope, Getting Started with a Telescope, Telescope, Astronomy, Astrophotography

Id: HocX2lqznWw

Length: 20min 23sec (1223 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020