Polar alignment software please!

I'm looking for a piece of software that will show me where Polaris will be in an eyepiece/finderscope when my ETX is correctly polar aligned. The only thing I can find so far is Polarfinder [ www.astrotips.com/Downloads+index-req-vi...e-Polar_Finder.phtml ]. Is there anyone out there who can write such a piece of software? Ideally the software would show the relative position of Polaris in the eyepiece for any telescope/eyepiece/finderscope combination. This would then make reasonably accurate polar alignment quick and easy.

Bob/Michael - good to see you again! How's Blighty?

Are you looking to produce something that mimics a polarscope on a PC screen (ie a graphic someone could print out and compare to their view)?

If so, I reckon it could be done. I saw a graphic recently showing the position of the Celestial Pole (and relative stars) for the next 20+ years. One could use a series of images showing this - the image that is shown to the user is chosen based on the date of their PC. The image could be scaled to whatever parameters they put in (eyepieces, finders etc) and printed out.

However, polar alignment seems to be pretty complex. Not only does your mount need to point at the pole, but your OTA (and finder, and eyepiece) needs to be orthogonal, the mount needs to be dead level etc etc. This is why polarscopes are better than a finder/eyepice (their machined more accurately) but why software programmes (like T-Point and PolaeAlignMax) are used to get dead nuts polar alignment.

If its something less accurate that's required (ie not for imaging or accurate GOTO functions) the scheme above *should* work reasonably well.

Hope this helps...

Cheers

Dave

Bob/Michael --

I hesitate to recommend AstroPlanner to do just this, but it does so much other useful stuff that it's worth taking a look at. You can download a trial copy at: www.ilangainc.com/astroplanner/ .

To get a view of Polaris, you'd need to go into Edit > Resources... and enter your scope(s) and eyepieces. Then you can choose Polaris as a target and go into the FOV tab to see what it looks like at any particular time/date (it defaults to "now", but you can set a particular time/date using the "Fix Date..." button in the upper-right of the Observing tab).

-- Jeff

I use astroplanner already for this, and it sort of does what I want, but in a rather clumsy way. You have to keep swapping backwards and forwards between screens to get different times and printing takes whole sheet of A4. It would nice have, like Polefinder, 4 charts to the page for different times. It's all a bit long winded.

In answer to thwe question about accurracy; no it doesn't need to be as accurate as drift alignment; this is for planetary webcam imaging and visual observing only, not long exposure imaging.