[seeker372011 (Narayan)]

it was finally clear tonight-though far too dewy to do any imaging at all so

I used the opportunity to test the new v 4.16 upgrade for the Celestron GEM hand controller

( I had previously downloaded v 4.15 but that had a bug for the southern hemisphere)

Its brilliant!

the main reason for getting this upgrade was the all star polar alignment routine, and I can now confirm it works as advertised.

Rough polar align-then do your usual star align -a couple of alignment stars and maybe a couple of calibration stars-could get really anal and do 6 or more calibration stars if you like.I used only one calibration star tonight

anyway then slew to any bright star-Acrux-say and select the polar alignment routine and -the scope slews to where Acrux should be if the mount were perfectly polar aligned-and then the hand controller guides you through what you need to do, which is basically make adjustments in alt-az to centre the star manually in your eyepiece

the best thing in my opinion is you dont need to redo the star align after polar aligning

In the past this feature was only available on sigma octans, and you needed to redo your star alignment after polar aligning. Now you can pick any named star and you dont need to redo your alignment

It is quite simply the fastest I have ever polar aligned!

Anyway if you have a Celestron GEM-a CG5 for instance, do consider downloading v 4.16 HC firmware if you have not so far . Its free anyway!

Narayan