For owners of Tak EM200 Mounts with the Northern Hemisphere Date/Time Reticules in their Polar Alignment ‘Scope, please find attached a copy of a Microsoft Excel (Office Pro 2003) Spreadsheet which converts the Northern Hemisphere Date/Time to the Southern Hemisphere equivalents.
Cheers
Dennis
PS - Although the attached version is currently configured for the year 2010, it is in fact a “perpetual” calculator and I will only change the text from say, 2010 to 2011 for cosmetic presentation purposes, as the calculations are not affected by year changes.
I don’t know anything about the design of the EM400 PAS and reticule, nor how they work, but I do believe that the NJP mount PAS is quite different to the EM200, so not all Tak mounts are the same in terms of the PAS and their polar alignment routines.
At a guess, if the EM400 has the following EM200 features, I suspect it should work:
Levelling bubble on the RA casting.
An outer Date (1-12) reticule (CW).
A concentric inner Time (0-23) reticule (ACW).
An etched position for Sigma Octans with a scale from 2000 to 2030
I have just updated the XLS spreadsheet to show 2012 in the explanatory text and attached it to this post as a ZIP file.
Note that when you open the file, it reads the System Time at the time of opening and then displays this value. It does not automatically refresh or update the time in the spreadsheet as the computer clock ticks on.
To update the displayed spreadsheet time to the current system time, you can press F9 and it refreshes the spreadsheet.
Cheers
Dennis
Last edited by Dennis; 20-01-2012 at 06:20 PM.
Reason: Added screen capture
No worries Mark, the version I posted should work for MS Excel 97 and onwards.
Here is another one where the static Year should update automatically, based on the system date of your operating system, although it will only work in Excel 2010 (and hopefully onwards ).
I guess I’ll find out on 1st Jan 2016 as I haven’t tested it yet!
Hii Dennis, my desktop operating system is Windows XP. I dont use MS Excel, instead I use Open Office Calc version 4.1.1 for spreadsheets. Both versions of your Tak time converter open fine in Open Office Calc. thanks Mark
Hii Dennis, my desktop operating system is Windows XP. I dont use MS Excel, instead I use Open Office Calc version 4.1.1 for spreadsheets. Both versions of your Tak time converter open fine in Open Office Calc. thanks Mark
Thanks for testing the 2 versions and for the feedback Mark – it is good to hear that the spreadsheet is robust enough to be opened and executed in a program other than the original, native MS app.
Thanks Dennis great aid indeed.....muchas gracias
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