Written by Emily Davison and Anika Cobby

As the dome atop KCL was recently rebuilt, the telescope needed to be re-aligned.

This telescope is mounted on an equatorial mount, which compensates for the Earth’s rotation by polar aligning with North’s celestial pole to track astronomical objects and keeps the telescope steady; this mount must face North to function correctly.
This was our first task, before the telescope could be mounted. We located North by
identifying a local church spire, which happened to be directly North of the telescope. The longitude for the telescope and spire were the same to 3 decimal places, -0.115. By loosening the 6 bolts around the base of the mount, holding it to the pedestal, the mount can be rotated carefully without needing to dismantle the telescope. The mount was then turned to face the spire, aligning it with North as accurately as we could. Only then could the telescope be mounted.

Next, we used the built-in features of our telescope’s program. Coordinates and the
hemisphere were selected before we decided on an appropriate program to polar align the
telescope. There are many programs to select from, but the All-Star Polar Alignment function
is the simplest and quickest function to use. It allowed us to identify approximately where a known astronomical object will be in our location’s sky, direct our telescope to that object and
then manually align & track the object with the telescope.
After manually centering the selected alignment object in our finderscope and eyepiece, this function will then model the sky based on the input and centering such that we could enter the latitude and longitude of star clusters to locate them in the night sky.

For more information on aligning the telescope, look here:
https://www.celestronmexico.com/pdf/500003_manual_y_software/Manual_de_Instrucciones.pdf