Polar Alignment


Polar alignmnet is the process of adjusting the mount positions and settings so that the right ascention axis points to the celestial pole, and will allow the mount (in principle) to slew anywhere on the sky.

 

For the KELT-S telescope, we first aligned the mount to the South Celestial Pole by eye, adjusting the latitude screw and the azimuth knobs.  We then created a Pointing Model with TPoint, using a small number of points (25).  We then took advantage of the TPoint software that provides feedback on how the readjust the mount for more precise polar alignment based on the pointing model.  In our case, we had to adjust the latitude screw by 6 tics on the knob and the azimuth knobs by 2 full turns.  We then recreated the pointing model with the same number of points, and the reported corrections for polar alignment were then smaller by about a factor of 2.