Warning: Found out my telescope was giving me wrong data for 6 months

I was looking at a photo of Jupiter's moons and realized the positioning didn't match any prediction apps, then discovered my tracking mount had been set to southern hemisphere this whole time. Has anyone else ever had a calibration issue that made your photos look completely different from reality?

3 comments

3 Comments

simon_coleman20d agoTop Commenter

Man I saw a post on another forum where a guy had a similar problem with his GoTo mount. He was shooting deep sky objects for like a year and kept wondering why everything looked kinda washed out and weird. Turns out he had the wrong time zone in his hand controller the whole time. It's wild how one little setting can mess up months of work. Your Jupiter moons thing reminds me of that because even the best gear can trick you if you don't double check every step. At least you caught it before another six months went by, right?

bettys5120d agoProlific Poster

Hang on, let me play devil's advocate here @simon_coleman. That wrong time zone thing? I'm not buying it. A year of washed out images and he only blames the time zone? More likely he had crappy processing skills or bad skies. Time zone might mess up your star alignment a little, but it's not going to ruin a year of data that badly. And your Jupiter moons point - sometimes gear just does what it does. Check it once, check it twice, but at some point you gotta trust the setup. Overthinking every little step can lead to more mistakes than just going with it.

garcia.laura18d ago

The time zone thing is huge, I had a mount that was off by one hour for three months before I caught it. Everything was consistently 15 degrees off in my subs and I kept blaming my polar alignment. Double check every menu setting on your hand controller even if you're sure it's right, the defaults on some of these mounts are sneaky.