The Pain of Polar Alignment

Time for the Polar Scope Align Pro App

Since I've started my foray into the wonderful world of DIY star tracking for astrophotography, the single most frustrating part of this endeavor has been to polar align my devices.  It's something that sounds real simple to do in theory - position your device so it aligns with the earth's rotational axis.  Not to mention in the Northern Hemisphere, we have a nice object in the sky to help in Polaris.

But as in life, the simple things always turn out to be way harder to do than they look.  I'm burning precious imaging and testing time tweaking and tuning my polar alignment to get 60 second exposures.  And I'm never quite sure if it's my alignment or my tracker design which is leading to failed photos.  

I've found an app to help with this so read on to learn about my new plan.

First Night - High Excitement, Low Expectations

Getting Ready for My First Shoot

I've been around long enough to have learned that despite my best efforts, I'm not going to produce a high-quality photo my first night out.  Heck, I'll be thrilled if I can even get good focus.

Point is, it's more about climbing up a pretty steep learning curve at this point than producing quality photos (by my standards).  So I'm not going to put any undue pressure on myself and I'm simply going to strive to learn something new.  In fact, that's pretty much going to be my goal for the foreseeable future.  If I can discover something new each time I go out, then I've made progress.

So it's time to get ready for my first night's shoot and while I'm really excited, I'm keeping rather low expectations.  But here's how I've prepared.