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Hi Robert,
Good to hear yours worked fine first up. I tried my newly unboxed unit last night (Bay of Plenty) and had all kinds of problems and couldnt even get a successful first align on one mount (CG-5 Eq), and on another mount (8SE Alt-Az) couldn't get it to slew to a named star to do the initial camera-ota calibrate after the first auto align said it had finished successfully.
I was thinking there may be a general southern hemisphere problem with the units but your experience indicates that isn't the case at least, which is good news.
Details of my very frustrating experience last night are below. I've tried to think what I may have entered wrong that could have led to the problems but I can't spot anything so far. If you spot anything in my description below that I may be doing wrong that can put me right I'd appreciate it. We may have a few cloudy nights in a row now which will probably delay my next attempts.
I at first thought I had managed to get my brand new starsense autoalign accessory to do a successful initial auto align tonight on an 8SE alt-az mount. At first glance it did it apparently successfully as it certainly said it had done a successful align, but from there on I found problems that stopped me calibrating the camera to the OTA as the align actually seemed to be anything but correct and I couldnt go to any named stars to use for the calibrate process.
The short version of my unit's symptoms on the SE mount are that on the first align I entered my position in deg/min/sec of long and latitude for my southern hemisphere location(long east and lat south), entered the time and date (date would only take and display a two digit YY year rather than the four digit YYY year the manual says it takes) etc, did the initial auto align which said it had completed successfully, but when I went to choose a named star to do the first calibrate of the unit to the OTA after the first autoalign, many of the stars listed were below the horizon for me, and many stars above my horizon were not on the list (on later equally unsuccessful attempts I changed the slew limits to 90 and 0 from the defaults of 70 and 10 before doing the align). Then when I started to investigate I could see that after the align process the HC/unit had changed my entered location data (yes I know that sounds very weird but I have photos of what I entered and what was there after the align) and now showed my latitude as North, not the South value that I had entered before starting the align. As well as it changing it to north the actual latitude numbers had also changed as well, but only slightly, perhaps by the amount the camera is misaligned to the ota.
If I tried to goto any star after the supposedly succesful align the ota seemed to want to point somewhere around 180 degrees away from the actual position of the star and I had to stop the slews as the OTA of course tried to crash into the mount as it pointed downwards, or in one case the OTA tried to flip itself right over backwards, going up and backwards through the zenith.
I repeated the process several times with the same result, including after doing a reset to default settings on the hc and a reset of the ais camera and starting again, several times.
After repeated attempts, to check I hadn't entered something wrong, I found I am also getting occasional lock ups during attempted autoaligns which seem very similar to the lockups reported by one northern hemisphere user. Hitting the back key seems to get past the lockups mostly, but in one case it didn't and I had to power the unit off and start again.
I also tried the unit on my CG-5 mount (with the new aux port splitter) and I had different problems there that also stopped me even getting a successful initial autoalign. On that mount any attempt at an autoalign would only point at one area of sky (it would always slew the OTA left and up from my home position and point to the SE) where the sky is obscured by trees, and wouldnt go and try a different area even after several minutes of the unit slewing around and retrying in the same general area (on the SE mount it would move around over large areas od the sky during the same autoalign process but on the CG-5 it seems to just look in that SE quadrant and not want to move from that region of sky). I then tried a manual starsense align in areas of clear sky (measuring around 21.2 to 21.3 on my Unihedron SQM) on the CG-5 mount and the unit/camera wouldn't find any stars after acquring an image and sensing despite it looking at the same areas of sky it found stars in when connected to the SE mount. It didnt say too few stars, it just went from saying "acquiring image" then "sensing" to asking me to move the mount to another position, time and time again. This was quite a different seeming set of problems from what I had on the 8SE mount, but also with an utterly unsuccessful result.
A VERY frustrating first night with the unit on two different mounts.
Cheers,
Chris
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