Quote:
Originally Posted by Fox
A second thing that is missing is the ability to ‘spiral search’ when you slew to an object but it’s not quite in the field of view, the Meade Autostar has this covered which seems to be a major advantage for imaging planets; ie you focus perfectly on a star at high magnification/bahtinov mask then you slew to a planet that’s slightly out of the field of view at such power.
Can EQMOD do both easily?
Thx, Fox
|
I personally haven't done any planetary/lunar imaging so I'm not entirely versed on tracking those objects. However, I too found the SW handset a little clumsy to use and instead opted to use plate solving for DSO target acquisition.
In basic terms, plate solving involves the process of selecting a target from a library of objects and having the mount slew to where it believes that object should be. It will then take an image and assess the star patterns on that image to determine exactly what it is looking at, once completed it will automatically determine who movements need to be made to hit that target so that it's center of frame.
I used the plate solving feature in Astrophotography Tool (which uses AllSkyPlateSolver or PlateSolve2) to do this and it worked flawlessly. The only thing you'll need to make sure is that the mount starts in the home position before doing this (since the EQ6 doesn't have encoders and therefore doesn't know the position it's in). It was a bit of a task to set it up for first use, but once done it made DSO imaging a breeze. I could be locked on any target I wanted within a minute or two of being polar aligned.
Hopefully someone else can shed some light on planetary aquisition/tracking
