The 20cm Saxon / Sky-Watcher NEQ6/AZ-EQ6 pier extension is a great way to gain the extra height needed to prevent long focal length OTA’s from colliding with the tripod legs. The extension is attached to the tripod using the standard central bolt. Even if the central bolt is tightened as much as possible, it doesn’t take much force to rotate the pier. This can be very annoying if you have carefully polar aligned the mount and it accidentally rotates while you are loosening or tightening the clutches on the AZ-EQ6.
This problem is easy to fix. Luckily the pier base plate is made of aluminium and is very easy to drill. The solution is to drill a 4mm hole very close to edge of the plate and tap it out to 5mm. You can then use an M5 socket head bolt to provide a locking post. The head of the bolt fits nicely into the original post hole on the tripod plate.
With the central bolt tightened it is now impossible for the pier to accidentally rotate.
Sampling rates can make your stars good or blocky, especially if you zoom in. It all depends on a few factors like your focal length, the size of the pixels in your sensor, how good the atmospheric conditions are, and even how good your guiding is. This article shows how to get a combination of telescope and camera that will give you nice smooth stars under a range of conditions.
This is an instalment of a tutorial series on how to slave a dome. In this part we look at connecting the dome control software to the dome and mount through the ASCOM Hub. Depending on the connections you can perform the slaving calculations in the dome control software or the ASCOM Hub.
In this second part of the dome slaving series, we discuss connecting your observatory control program directly to the dome and the mount using ASCOM drivers. This is the simplest we to set it up, and allows you to use the observatory control program to do the slaving calculations.
