Stop relying on autoguiding if your polar alignment is sloppy, I wasted 4 nights in Ridgecrest learning this

Jade Lane · 2026-09-25T17:00:04.515482+00:00

I shoot from my driveway in Ridgecrest, CA where the light dome from town kills anything below 30 degrees, so I have to nail my alignment or I lose half the sky. For weeks I kept blaming my autoguider for trailing stars in 3 minute subs, and I was about to drop $300 on a new guide scope when a guy at the local astronomy club told me to check my polar alignment first. I ran SharpCap's polar alignment routine for the first time and my error was 14 arcminutes off, which is way more than I thought. After dialing it down under 1 arcminute, my guiding RMS dropped from 1.8 to 0.6, and suddenly I could push 5 minute subs on M31 with round stars. The catch is you need a clear view of Polaris and about 10 minutes to do the routine, but it saved me from buying gear I didn't need. Has anyone else found that fixing one basic thing made their autoguider look way better than it actually was?

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Stop relying on autoguiding if your polar alignment is sloppy, I wasted 4 nights in Ridgecrest learning this | Astronomy Photos - The Community Guide