Polar Alignment

My primary observing site is on the deck behind my two storey home.
Aside from blocking a substantial portion of the northern sky, I have no
way of aligning my equatorial mount with Polaris. Can anyone suggest
ways I can reliably get my scope polar aligned in with this arrangement?

Thanks,
Eric

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 01:19:03 GMT, Eric Johnson
wrote:

My primary observing site is on the deck behind my two storey home.
Aside from blocking a substantial portion of the northern sky, I have no
way of aligning my equatorial mount with Polaris. Can anyone suggest
ways I can reliably get my scope polar aligned in with this arrangement?

Get it close with a compass, then drift align. If you don't leave the
scope outside, be sure to provide some reference marks so you can set
things up in the same position again.

If you are just using the scope for visual work, the compass alone is
probably enough. If you are doing imaging, Polaris won't get you close
enough anyway. On the whole, I've never found Polaris useful at all for
polar alignment.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

Eric Johnson wrote:

My primary observing site is on the deck behind my two storey home.
Aside from blocking a substantial portion of the northern sky, I have no
way of aligning my equatorial mount with Polaris. Can anyone suggest
ways I can reliably get my scope polar aligned in with this arrangement?

If you can't put a permanent pier in place, mark where your tripod
legs go so you can replace it fairly accurately. Drift alignment will
get you the rest of the way. For the initial alignment I'd just use a
compass then drift align the rest of the way, but you could (with the
aid of a star chart) use a star due south as a reference for azimuth.


Tim
--
This is not my signature.

I have trees blocking polaris. Generally I come close enough to true
north for comfortable visual purposes by eyeballing the mount with a
compass. I have even succesfully taken 15 second exposures this way. In
my opinion of 'limited' experience..... course' I have recently been
spoiled by a permanent mount! Hehe.

my astronomy page, info and pics at:
www.geocities.com/spiral_72/Spirals_page.html