Having got a clear night where I was available, I decided to Polar Align the polar scope in the EQ6 mount. The instruction manual has a rigmarole to go through to ensure the reticle in the polar scope is correctly aligned (i.e. how its rotated in the scope). As it turns out, after reading the EQ6 forum, reticle alignment isn’t important at all.

What is important is positioning the reticle in the polar scope, using the 3 grub screws so that when the mount is rotated about the RA axis, a star stays centered in the scope’s cross-hairs.

Now fiddling with grub screws in the dark is problematical. Because they’re black, in a black tube, they’re hard to see. The manual also gives no guidance as to how many turns you should give a grub screw when centering the reticle in the polar scope. There’s actually a lot of thread on the grub screws so I figured, one turn would be enough for each of them as I adjusted the reticle’s position. So I continued tweaking the grub screws as I gradually centered the reticle.

Then, for some reason, the reticle markings went out of focus.

When I tried tightening the grub screws, I found one was missing. It must have fallen out in the dark, though I hadn’t heard anything hit the floor. I turned on the light in a vain attempt to locate the missing screw. There’s a gap in the floor around the base of the pier so walking on the floor won’t cause vibrations in the telescope. Just my luck that the screw would have bounced into that gap and fallen into oblivion below.

I checked other astronomy equipment I have in the observatory for a similar screw I could use as a replacement. No luck there either. It looked like any idea I had of polar aligning the mount were done for.

The last thing I tried was adjusting the focus on the polar scope to see if I could bring the reticle markings into sharp relief. Nope, that didn’t work. So I unscrewed the polar scope eyepiece only to hear two thuds on the floor – the reticle had just fallen out along with the missing grub screw which had been inadvertently screwed all the way into the polar scope earlier. Not finding any purchase on the rim of the reticle, it had screwed all the way into the scope.

The easiest way to get the reticle back into the polar scope was to remove the mount from the pier, turn it upside down and drop the reticle back into position, then tighten the grub screws. The eyepiece was screwed back in, the EQ6 remounted on the pier, and the process of polar aligning it begun all over again.

Attempting to re-center the reticle, the markings went out of focus again. Yep. the reticle had dropped out of position once more and again I had to unmount the EQ6, drop in the reticle, remount and reposition.

It turns out that screw adjustments of any more than a quarter turn can combine to provide enough space to allow the reticle to drop out of position. It would have been really helpful if the manual had made this known and saved me a lot of heartache and frustration.

Anyway,. my reticle is now dusty from its sojourns on the floor but I finally managed to polar align the mount. What should have taken no more that a few minutes, took a couple of hours and put my blood pressure through the roof.

Hopefully, that’s the last dumb and irritating thing that will happen!

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Filed under: My Personal Astronomy Blog