Hi Julian
When I saw Alexandar's reply, I presumed he was talking about something I needed to do once-off when I had bought the scope. However when I went through the manual online (which I always try to read when I get something new
) to double check, the "setup" was basically what I was doing before each observation anyways. That is why I said I was doing "everything as expected"
The scope was correctly aligned since when I did a GoTo to Mars, it put mars dead center in the field of view of the main scope
Sorry for the confusion and thank you for your reply
Quote:
Originally Posted by julianh72
Draco,
I'm confused - did you, or did you not, start the evening's viewing with a "Two-Star Easy Align" as set out on pages 18-20 of the user manual http://www.meade.com/software-manual...=6:lx90-manual ? (Page numbers are for Meade manual ref. 14-6700-21 rev001 07/12 - see the last page of the manual to see if we're using the same document.)
In this post you say you are doing it all "as expected", but in an earlier post, you said you "don't remember doing any set-up procedure for the mount". (You would remember aligning the telescope if you had done it. If you never saw the "Alignment Successful" message on the handset, you have NOT aligned your mount.) Once you have gone through the initial alignment procedure a couple of times, it only takes 2 - 3 minutes to get your scope aligned each time you set it up.
If you skip the two-star alignment procedure, you can drive the mount as a dumb powered Alt-Az, but it won't track stars, or GoTo targets. (I guess the telescope controller "assumes" that it started the night in the "Home North" orientation, or some other default orientation, so will drive the motors accordingly, but the tracking speeds will be all out of whack if that was not the case.)
Once you have done the initial alignment, you can GoTo any target in its database (or manually enter the coordinates), or just manually drive the scope around using the handset controller buttons ( DON'T release the clutches to manually slew the scope!), and it will track whatever you stop on once you release the drive control buttons. |