Hi all,

I'm embarrassed to say that I can't find the site or name of the person that
suggested a method of aligning the ota to the forks, by aiming the scope,
rotating it 180 degrees, then flipping the ota 180 degrees in Dec.

I really should know that site, because I've been there before and I know the
person, and I had all of this stuff written down, as well.

At any rate, I just wanted to pass along a little tidbit about this method.
A week or so ago, I purposely threw my OTA alignment out as far as it could
go. I did this on purpose because I wanted to do some experimenting and make
some tests of a few things. My scope is permanently mounted and is on a
wedge, so I don't operate in alt-AZ mode, but Polar mode.

Yesterday, I decided to give the procedure a quick try, just to get into the
ball park. I picked an object only some 300 feet away, and I used the method
mentioned, of pointing the scope at a small spot on my mail box.

A couple of relatively quick, and certainly painless, iterations of the
technique and I had the OTA aligned to within an arc minute. I could have
spent more time and gotten it more accurate, but I'll save that for another
day.

The whole point here, is to say that this technique appears TO ME, to be at
least as good as ... or better than.... any other method I've seen and tried,
for aligning the OTA to the forks, and you can do it while the scope is on
the wedge! That, I like!

Furthrmore, after a little bit of thinking about it before I tried it, I
realize that you do not have to pick a really distant object to use in order
to get it accurate. There should be no parallax effects at all between the
two positions of the scope, other than perhaps the minor difference in
distance that the OTA might be from one fork to the other, which is
insignificant at a distance of 100 meters or more.

So whoever you are, you get a well deserved pat on the back from me, for
suggesting this method of OTA to fork alignment! Keep up the good work.


Bruce Johnston

Bruce Johnston Computing
<http://members.aol.com/bjohns7764>
Internet home for "SuperFix" and "MegaFix" image processing software.
Personal page: <http://members.aol.com/ccdastro>

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