I'm after help, stories of your troubles and triumphs, and any general information to help me use my Losmandy GM-8 (with gemini) better.
The Losmandy is my portable setup. So it's never setup in the same place twice within a 4 week period. Perhaps this is part of my problem.
Ignoring the drift method, I find it very hard to consistently get good polar alignment. I try using the Polar Align Assist and Polar Align Correction functions of the Gemini. Sometimes I think they work but then soon find they clearly haven't and I still seem to be off.
I seem to consistently have different RA tracking problems - like, tracking at the wrong speed. This weekend for example I got it setup, used Polar Align Correction, then was trying to autoguide on a star near 47 Tuc only to discover after experimenting that if I turned off the RA motor (set tracking to terrestial) the guide star was drifting at the same rate .. so like the RA motor wasn't working but it was turning.. and moving to Orion it was tracking...
Most of my problems seem to have the symptom that the RA tracking is wrong. Dec drift occurs but nothing like RA drift. I don't really understand what affects RA tracking?
Balance is generally perfect, I can move all payloads in all directions and easily counter-balance the setup (it's well under weight limit). I use the standard counterweight.
My LX200 I can easily polar align by hopping between two SAO stars and making appropriate correctsion. I duno why it's so hard on the Losmandy, I think maybe just because I'm always in a new location with that bit more uncertainty on N/S direction, correct level of the mount, etc.
Setting it up for visual use is a breeze, after doing 4 odd additional alignments it'll go straight to each object dead bang on centre no problem, and track them fine. Getting the level of tracking accuracy needed for photography seems to be a completely different story, more so than with my LX.
Any input? tips? pointers? What's your setup proceedure? help!
I'm getting sick of wasting my 400km trips to the country. I feel like a $1000 mount would behave better than my $4000 mount right now.
Maybe I don't set the RA/DEC locks the right tightness? maybe my initial polar alignment guess is so far off nothing works? maybe I need to adjust the worm gears? maybe I just need to understand the manual better. I do refer to the manual continuously when trying to use the different gemini alignment functions to make sure I get it right, out of frustration more than anything.
Oh and there are occasions when it works. Really don't know what the difference is - as I said at the start, observing sessions with it are usually 2 weeks apart at least, 4 weeks for deep sky astro photography stuff so it's hard to remember between goes the finer details a paturn of what works and what doesn't.
Roger.