Open your planetarium app, and place the phone on the lens cap with its back flat against the cap with some tape or an elastic cord. Your telescope or lens cover will act as a surface perpendicular to the mount’s polar axis.
If you’re using a German equatorial mount with your lens or telescope, attach your optic to the mount, set the declination to +90°, and keep the lens cap on. Next, set up your mount with the polar axis pointed close to North. For German equatorial mounts without a polar scope, set the Declination to +90° and attach your smartphone to your telescope or camera's lens cap. Attaching your smartphone over the front of your polar finder works just as well. (The planetarium apps Sky Safari and SkEye include crosshairs). The brightness settings on the display should be as high as possible, so you can see it in the daylight. Here’s how it works.įirst, check to make sure the app on your smartphone has an equatorial grid function, and possibly either a crosshair or a Telrad field-of-view circle.
You’re in luck, because there is a way to get rough polar alignment that takes about 30 seconds! All you need is your smartphone with a planetarium app installed that automatically aligns with the sky using the phone’s internal compass and accelerometer - and a flat surface on your lens cap or an equatorial wedge. If only there were a quick way to align your scope. What to do? You can race down the road with a few minutes to spare, but accurately following the Sun without polar aligning your mount in broad daylight is next to impossible. Your weather app tells you that conditions are much better several miles from where you’re stationed. Let’s say you’re all set to capture photos of the 2017 solar eclipse with your trusty scope on a Sun-tracking equatorial mount, but clouds thwart your view of the event. Aligning an Apogee fork mount using an iPhone running Sky Safari 5.
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