salutations celestial sight seers i'm david fuller with eyes on the sky 10 years ago i did a video
for the very first time on youtube and it was how to align an equatorial mount and while that video
is still accurate i have gotten a lot of questions over the years about how to aim the telescope
at the celestial pole without having to be able to see the celestial pole so if you either can't
see polaris in the northern hemisphere or if you're in the southern hemisphere and you are
trying to align towards sigma octans which is a very dim star
it's only fifth magnitude then how do you do that or what if you have a tree in the way - NOOOO! -
or a building or some other structure where you're unable to be able to physically see
where the celestial pole is at so this video is designed to help you do that and do it quickly
so here's how we kind of start with that you do need one piece of equipment and that's going to
be a decent compass and what the compass is going to be able to do it's going to help you
set the telescope in the right direction and we'll kind of need to do sort of two things
at once we're going to need to both level the telescope as well as align it so you might have
to do a little bit of one and the other but we'll start by aiming this you can see i am actually on
uneven ground here so we need to make sure that we're adjusting our legs to accurately get things
set up now one thing about a compass when you're using it near something like iron
the problem is is that it can mess up the compass and cause it to give an inaccurate reading so what
i do is i just use a little piece of wood and then you can hold that right on there and then
parallel and you're going to get a much better reading now i'm not anywhere close to being north
uh north is kind of this way from where i'm at so what we want to do
is have the counterweights facing towards the north so i'm literally just going to pick up
the mount and spin it around because on this particular mount i cannot actually spin it uh
very far it's just got a limited movement to be able to do that so we'll get this all set up there
and that's pretty close it's not dead on but it's close enough that i'll be able to use the fine
adjustment so now what i want to do is actually level the telescope and there's a bubble level on
this particular mount so that helps me to level it if you don't have that there's a couple different
ways you can do that one is you can use a plumb line which is just a weight with a string on it
and you can actually hold that right underneath the center of the telescope here and have it drop
down right in the middle of where your tray is and if that's centered then you'll be all set
and just like that i've got a good level with my bubble level here
we need to make sure that we are aimed in the correct direction so i'm gonna pull these open
like this give myself plenty of room that way i can spin the mount like this i'll bring my
compass back out now the thing that you need to know about a compass is that magnetic north is not
the same as true north so while i have this aimed directly at magnetic north right now my actual
location from where i am is about four degrees off of true north so i need to adjust for that
and then i can use these to even refine that just a little bit further if i need to and then
also lock it into place so that it won't move during my observing or astrophotography session
and that's pretty good that has me at magnetic north
that i have adjusted where my actual north is you can see this is a really good compass because it
allows me to move this and has a nice sharp line right there showing where i'm at and i'm four
degrees off of north so when it aims north on the compass itself i can account and adjust for that
so that gets me at true north now i need to look at what my actual latitude is so we can
find that with a simple google search or using your favorite search engine to find out what your
actual latitude is you want to get that within a degree is really going to be ideal most telescope
mounts only provide at best about every two degrees and with this particular telescope
you can even see the arrow is a flat looking arrow from how it was actually uh made when it was cast
so that's not terribly accurate necessarily so in order to adjust that we want to take
our slow motions here and you can see i can move this down this way
if i was closer towards the equator i would be able to move it this direction so with this i'm
you know closer to like 32 degrees and then if we want to crank that up we can move that up as well
uh if you happen to be in either the northern part of the united states or in canada or even in the
united kingdom then you would want this quite a bit further and it would need to be more like this
up more towards maybe 50 or 55 or even if you're north of there
you can bring that all the way up as well so i'm at 41 degrees north latitude so what i want to do
is try to look at this and get it as close as i possibly can because i know i'm facing north
so if i get it as close as i can to that 41 and that's going to put me right between the
40 and the 42 mark that should be pretty close and then i want to lock this one on this side
and now i'm locked here so i cannot move left to right relative to what the
celestial pole is and now i also have my latitude correct because the latitude that
i have this set at is going to be parallel to the axis of the earth how it rotates so
when you're parallel with that then you can turn your telescope in right ascension and declination
and then it will follow the stars depending on which direction that you have your telescope
pointed now you can see that this is not balanced so that's what we're going to do next
so this is really really off and the reason why you want to balance the telescope is because it's
helpful to be able to unlock those clutches this is your right ascension clutch because that's that
axis right here that aims towards the pole and in declination you want to be able to
aim the telescope whatever you want to try to look at without having to touch it because
you're going to want to be able to move that mount to aim precisely at what you want to see
and then once you've done that you will be able to then re-lock the clutches engage your motor drives
and then have your mount automatically track the night sky not every mount has the automatic
motor drive some of them may just have a slow motion control and even if that's the case
then really you just follow the sky just by slowly turning that so let's see how
our balance is so if we remove this that's still a little off so i need to move that up
and that looks pretty good in right ascension so that's not going to move at all now you know
it may have noticed that i actually go ahead and mark these because it's so much easier in the dark
to have even just a simple knowing which right ascension and which one goes to declination you
don't need to mark both but even just one then you know that the other one goes into the other
location so we also need to get ourselves set in declination now for this particular telescope
i'm at a bit of a disadvantage and i need to change this somewhat because even though
this looks like it's balanced it actually is a little bit tail heavy and i also need to still
put a star diagonal and an eyepiece on there so that's really going to make it heavy on
that end because i also have a finder scope there but i can't move this any further so
i actually need a longer dovetail mount that i can move this further back this direction so i
can balance the telescope more because i've run out of space to be able to lock this into place
so once we have that all set then we can lock everything into place
and then you will be aligned at the celestial pole and then you'll be able to
aim the mount wherever you want to go so if you want to look at something that's towards
the celestial pole you can do this if you want something that's maybe more towards the celestial
equator you do this now if you're going on that side of the sky don't do this you don't want your
counterweight up do a meridian flip flip it around and then aim it that way and it's just as simple
as that and that's how you align an equatorial mount without having to see the celestial pole
and then you're all set to be able to observe the sky and only have to turn it in one direction for
an axis or turn on the motor drive and let it go i want to thank you for checking out this video and
sticking with me for the last 10 years i've been making videos on how to find all kinds
of amazing things in the night sky we've looked at solar eclipses we've looked at lunar eclipses
we've looked at comets we've seen all the planets including pluto yes pluto you're still a planet
we've looked at all kinds of deep sky objects and double stars and a lot of amazing things to
be able to see in the night sky and i hope you'll continue that journey with me i'll keep helping
you find amazing things and i'll help you learn how to use your equipment to the maximum potential
so that you can see that too thanks for watching i'm david fuller wishing you clear and dark skies
NOOOO!
um..
what are you doing? what? are you trying to see the stars in the moon better? yes.
maybe try something different you have the hedge trimmers