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Took me 4 hours to realize my star tracker was off by 2 degrees

I set up my Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer for a Milky Way shot last Saturday night. I spent forever leveling the tripod and polar aligning, but every single 2 minute exposure came out blurry. After 4 hours of messing with the settings and almost packing up, I noticed the declination bracket was loose by like 2 degrees. Has anyone else had a tiny setup issue wreck a whole night?
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3 Comments
dylan_bell
dylan_bell2mo ago
Eh, come on, you're basically saying your whole night was wasted because you didn't bother to tighten one screw? A quick check before you started shooting would have saved you all that time.
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uma_johnson
Read this thing online the other day about how most diy stuff fails because of the prep work, not the actual doing. Guy was talking about how we all skip the boring steps because we just wanna get to the fun part, then we end up redoing everything anyway. That 2 degree tilt probably wouldve shown up in a test shot too if the bipod was off. True that a quick tighten wouldve solved it but sometimes your brain just says "good enough" and you pay for it later.
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barbara_baker57
Nothing like a 2 degree oops to turn 4 hours into a humble reminder.
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