Stargazer95050's articles with the keyword: astrometry

Plate-solving is useful -- especially when you use it to correct a telescope's position in real-time . You also can feed the solver an existing photo and manually read the results but using the output can be cumbersome. Manual copy & paste coordinates of input fields of tools like Stellarium helps, but that approach isn't very user friendly. Here's a different take on this -- solve the image and instantly get the sky map of that region. Again, this is using mostly freeeware tools.

Observing stars becomes easier if you don't have to constantly make adjustments. This is even more important, if you want to make long-exposure photos of the sky. The solution is simple & elegant -- the Earth rotates around it's axis and if you counteract that rotation, you keep looking at the same position in the sky. There are different names for solutions to do that, most notably an "equatorial mount". Barndoor- and other star-tracking accessories all use the same principle and require the same preparation steps -- THE POLAR ALIGNMENT