Vixen SkySensor 2000 Poor Alignment Issue
Matthew
I guess I got a bit excited thinking the issue would be resolved with the gear setting. It didn't work. So my settings are as follows.
Mount pointing South (I have holes in the paving outside for the tripod legs, the scope in the horizontal position and pointing East ( 0 deg el).
It should be noted here that I use a side by side plate but the scope is still pointing East as per users guide.
On powering up I select "0" default value then "enter" which has my home coordinates set. Date and time are set as YY/MM/DD and using 24 hour format and +08 time zone. Location is set at +115 48' 53" (Lon) and -31 55' 35" (Lat). Gearing was checked with my manual at 36 x 144 for both RA and DEC ( note that when I changed the + to a - the motors the slewed the wrong way). I had to revert back to positive for correct rotation. Motor parameters are now set to 3 as per your advice on heavier equipment. I am in "unaligned equatorial" mode.
My first ref star for alignment (Rigel Kent) was way off but I used the hand control to centre the star and pressed align until it beeped. I then pressed esc to choose a second ref star (Antares) which again went no where near but the mount slewed in the correct direction. I persisted and centred Antares and pressed align until it beeped but this time it still said "one star align" and not 2. My third reference star was Vega and when I pressed "goto" the scope slewed in the opposite direction to Vega and stopped pointing almost 180 deg away (South instead of North). At this point I went back to Antares which was fairly accurate ( very close to centre in the eyepiece). In the set up menu there is "PC Protocol" which gives me the option of SkySensor 2000, Ultima 2000 and LX200 and several values for "Baud". In my frustration I tried all 3 options and reading some blogs online it appears that it should be on LX200 (not SkySensor 2000) and 9600 Baud. My mount is Vixen GPD2.
Any further thoughts?
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