One of the drawbacks of having astrophotography gear on tripods is that you HAVE to polar align them every time you setup. Sure, it’s assisted by things like the Three Point Polar Alignment plugin for NINA, but it still takes time to get it spot on, and it’s bloody fiddly!
If you’re an old git like me, you don’t want to be fumbling round in the dark doing it either – and whilst our garden can’t accommodate a “proper” observatory, our recent renovations DID leave room for the next best thing, a permanent pier setup.
It’s quite simple really – get a bloody great block of concrete, bolt a steel pier to it that’s not going anywhere even if a bus hits it, connect your mount to that, polar align it VERY carefully once – and then promptly forget about it until next season, where you could probably polar align it again just to be sure if you really wanted to.
When we had the extension built and there was heavy machinery on site, I had the guys dig me out a 60cm cube hole and pour some concrete into it. The plan was then to secure a second hand Altair Astro steel pier that I’d picked up into the slab with shield anchors. Mount head attached, Telegizmo cover installed – and all I have to do now is drag out the scope, attach it to the mount, balance, power stuff up and I’m away. Setup time for the smaller William Optics outfit is now around four minutes – the big Askar takes a little longer, just because it’s so bastard heavy, requires finer balancing and the addition of counterweights – but even so it’s sub 10 minutes.
Given how inaccurate our local weather forecast has been of late this setup has been a godsend in getting out and imaging on those unsuspecting clear nights – just a shame that I only got it installed as we reach the end of another astronomy season. Roll on autumn!
