Alignment

The alignment

In order to realize long exposure times in astrophotography with a parallactic mount, the mount must be aligned with its right ascension axis very exactly parallel to the Earth's rotation axis. This process is called alignment.
The alignment is the essential step for the creation of good astrophotos, because it determines how long the exposure can be without errors.

If an autoguider is used during the exposure time (see menu point 'Components' - 'Guiding variants'), small alignment errors caused by inaccurate alignment can be compensated by the motors of the mount.

A slightly inaccurate alignment is even recommended when using an autoguider, because the correction signals of the autoguider always track the declination axis in one direction, and a possible backlash in the declination axis is avoided.[https://teleskop-austria.at]

However, too large correction steps are disadvantageous and can lead to jerking or vibrating of the mount up to abort by the guiding software.