ALTITUDE AND AZIMUTH ADJUSTERS
Altitude and azimuth adjusters play a big role in rough aligning the mount. TPoint can suggest how many turns of these adjusters will refine polar alignment accuracy. Designed for use between 0-64° latitude, altitude
adjustment slots allow you to get in the right ball park for fine
tuning polar altitude alignment.
and identifies whether you’ve put the telescope on the right way round. TPoint is taught how well the mount is aligned by slewing to an object in TheSkyX and adjusting the telescope, via the handset, to centre the object. Once done, this pointing sample is added to TPoint’s sky model database. For a portable mount, this must be done with every setup. We found that given six pointing samples, anything we slewed to via TheSkyX would be centred correctly. Camera exposures up to 60 seconds were fine, but anything longer showed trailing. With 25 points defined, unguided exposures of 300 seconds amazingly showed little sign of trailing. Increasing the count further takes you closer to the quoted unguided maximum of 1,200 seconds (20 minutes) – a seriously impressive figure for any mount, portable or not. Autoguiding and Software Bisque’s DirectDrive guiding, which connects directly to the mount controller, are also supported should you need them.
If you don’t fancy working through lots of pointing samples manually and have a camera attached, facility is provided to automate the process. Here, TheSkyX slews to selected targets, takes a photo via the included Camera add-on, and works out where it’s looking. This process can produce more than 100 samples per hour, leading to a highly accurate sky model.
From initially uneasy feelings about the marriage of high precision and portability, the MYT proved itself spectacularly. It’s true that £5,000 is a lot of money for a portable mount, but the ease of setup and benefits it brings are definitely worth it. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from buying the MYT and setting it up as a semipermanent or even permanent mount. If this is done the TPoint model remains valid even after the mount is turned off, giving you superb accuracy night after night.