Telescope Pointing
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 7:09AM Unfortunately my telescope pointing had been lost so I have had to start again with TPoint to map stars so that corrections for the mechanical imperfections of the mount can be calculated and corrected for. I need to have the target in the centre of the image every time so that the image can be blinked with the library master. I have also changed to f/10 which gives me an image that is 11.43 minutes square requiring greater pointing accuracy so I am trying to get the polar alignment to be more accurate so that it points at the refracted pole. I have had 3 runs at the mapping with 17 stars per run having applied the 6 fixed terms and 4 harmonic terms. TPoint is now indicating that the telescope is pointing 23 seconds of arc above the pole whereas I estimate by interpolation that I need this to be 44.76 arcseconds for my latitude.