开云体育

On 1/5/2021 10:18 PM, Michael Herman wrote:
> You MAY have to adjust the camera focus manually.? A few people said
> that the camera is already focussed by the factory, but you must not
> count on this being true.
> To focus the camera lens, you will have to unscrew the outer barrel.?
> Look at the QHY website instruction manual for the Polemaster and follow
> that.
>

FWIW, my Polemaster was NOT focused correctly as received.? Also, in
addition to unscrewing and removing the outer barrel you need to loosen
a tiny setscrew on the side of the lens assembly to allow the lens to be
turned to focus.? An Allen wrench is included in the package for that
purpose.

In my Bortle 7 skies in less than ideal transparency, I typically need
to increase the exposure and gain to clearly show the dimmer alignment
stars.? If you leave the gain and exposure at their defaults settings
and especially if the camera is not focused perfectly, you might not be
able to detect dimmer alignment stars in brighter skies.

Another point of trivia.... when you double click on Polaris the
software does not appear to calculate the star centroid.? It merely
accepts your double click location even if slightly off center.? This
can cause the alignment stars to not be perfectly centered in the
circles when you rotate the view.? I am assuming this will also cause
small inaccuracies in determining the center of rotation and location of
the celestial pole but in practice I don't think those inaccuracies are
large enough to worry about.

And finally, someone correct me if I am wrong but I don't think the
Polemaster software actually does a plate solve.? It uses your
identification of Polaris and the other alignment stars and does math to
calculate the center of rotation and location of the celestial pole.? As
such, as long as you can see the alignment stars onscreen and place the
circles over them, everything should work.

Paul

--
Paul Goelz
Rochester Hills, MI? USA
pgoelz@...