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Meridian flip . . . coming up next! Hello my name is Doug Hubbell and welcome
to Astrophotography Tutorials. Today I'm going to be talking about the meridian flip. The
meridian flip is when your telescope comes close to your tripod or your tripod leg, and
then you need to flip your telescope to keep tracking your object through the night sky.
It's really important that you manage this flip correctly, because if you don't you'll
mess up your alignment. So this is what happens during the night when
your telescope might encounter your tripod or your tripod leg and this is what we call
the meridian flip. Where it gets pretty close to straight up and down with Zenith right
there and it comes close to hitting the tripod leg. And if you just let go and let it hit
there, it's going to mess up your tracking. So you have to be aware that the telescope
might encounter the tripod and it does you need to know when to switch and move it out
of the way, otherwise you 'll end up doing another alignment and you don't want to do
that in the middle of night. In order to keep tracking your object you
need to do what's called a meridian flip. And an easy way of timing this I found is
to use your fist to gauge about one hour. And then from there you can make a better
estimate when you need to actually do the flip. Now if you do the flip too early, it
really won't flip because it doesn't have enough room on the other side to make the
flip. So usually what I like to do, Is I like to wait until it gets you know may be a couple,
three fingers, something like that, before it counters this, and then make the flip.
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videos on the 1st and the 15th of every month. Thanks for watching and I hope to see you
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