Do you have a telescope with an Equatorial mount? If so, you know the importance of starting with a good basic polar alignment. I have published a Polar Align Watchface for the Pebble Watch to assist in performing a Polar Alignment on an Equatorial Mount with a Polar Finder Scope installed.
When I got my new Celestron 8se in January over 3 years ago, I had night after night of wonderful clear skies. I immersed myself in getting back into Astronomy and quickly got a German Equatorial Mount and then moved into Video Astronomy. This year it has been cloudy with possible rain today with predictions of cloudy with possible rain week after week. If the skies then had been like they have been this year in my area, I might have given up. Glad it was good back then, and I'm trying to be patient now. Video Astronomy lets you see more than you could ever see looking through an eyepiece. But even Video Astronomy has trouble seeing through clouds!
So I decided to make myself useful and do some programming to help with my setup process when the skies actually are clear again! I keep my telescope on my mount covered in my garage and roll it out for viewing. I ran into an issue though trying to use the Polar Finder Scope with all my equipment already in place. I found I could rotate the telescope OK to be able to see through the Polar Finder Scope installed in the RA axis of the telescope.
So I decided to make myself useful and do some programming to help with my setup process when the skies actually are clear again! I keep my telescope on my mount covered in my garage and roll it out for viewing. I ran into an issue though trying to use the Polar Finder Scope with all my equipment already in place. I found I could rotate the telescope OK to be able to see through the Polar Finder Scope installed in the RA axis of the telescope.
Normally you also need to rotate the mount around its RA axis to align the image etched inside the Finder Scope to match what you see in the sky in order to know where to position Polaris on the Finder Scope’s circle.
With the telescope and equipment already on the mount, some rotation positions around its polar axis are not very practical. So if you cannot do this, what do you do? I use my Pebble Polar Align Watchface!
When launched, the Polar Align Watchface shows the position of Polaris relative to the North Celestial Pole as seen through a Polar Finder Scope. This watchface enables you to manually adjust the Altitude and Azimuth of the telescope mount to "move" Polaris as seen through the Polar Finder Scope to the watchface's indicated point on the circle of the Finder Scope (without having to rotate the telescope around the mount’s polar axis to match the sky position).
This type of polar alignment will typically be good enough for visual astronomy and basic video astronomy. I discuss several more advanced polar alignment techniques in my second book “Beginning Astronomy with a Celestron Equatorial Mount … So, what’s the matter?”
The Polar Align Watch also displays the current local time in 24 hour format and the Month/Day to assist entering time and date information into the telescope hand controller if needed.
To install the Polar Align Watch on a pebble watch, tap the Pebble app on your phone and select Get Watchfaces. Tap Search and select Watchfaces, and then enter “Polar Align”. Tap the screen for the Polar Align Watch and Add it to your Pebble watch. That’s it!
Oh, if you have a lot of cloudy skies, don’t give up. It will be clear again someday, and it will be worth the wait!
Oh, if you have a lot of cloudy skies, don’t give up. It will be clear again someday, and it will be worth the wait!
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