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Anthony when you said ""The start postion for the telescope is the index marks. As I pointed out early the hand controller dose not know were it is until the time,date,location and 3 star alignment is complete. By moving the mount to RA 00:00:00 and DEC 00:00:00 will cause a lot of trouble as you have found out. Example if the Index Marks are line up correctly on the DEC (e.g. the front of the telescope is pointing south) and then you rotate the DEC in an Easterly direction so that the DEC reading on the hand controller reads 00:00:00 and then do a alignement you will more then likely be 90degress of your first alignement star. I think you have experienced the problem already."
Actually my procedure corrected this and for the first time things just worked. When this orocedure wasn't applied the motor housings would always knock and alignment was nigh on impossible to complete.
I didn't try and complicate things for fun or sheer bloody mindedness, I need it for survival and it subsequentially brought me joy. Following the manual on page 20 over my first 16 attempts simply failed until the correction I gave above. I am still awaiting Celestron's response beyond the rather helpful (I kid you not) "doesn't this guy know how to use a GE mount?"
I am still very puzzled why when I set it to 0 00 00 manually for the star alignment position, then ended the in the same position - why it now read 90 00 00 and 90 00 00.
Perhaps its a bug in my mount?
PS
I need to re-test to see what I changed. I believe it was the RA and DEC settings, but what if it was the ALT and AZ readouts? My unfamilarity with the handcontrollers menu may have lead me to confuse the two. On the next clear night I'll be more exacting as to what I do and how cleanly it fixes the problems.
PPS
I noticed comming out of hibernation the scopes RA drive movement was jerking back and forth slightly on start up. This occurred yesterday to and when I looked at the setings for +ve and -ve RA and DEC backlash all four were set to 18. I re-set these back to 0 and all jerkiness went away again.
Why is this happening now and why must I reset this on every start-up?
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