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Great purchase Paul.
Your EM400 is very nice but the PME is a whole lot better.
As Jase points out it is pretty much plug and play. I like the way it interfaces with the Sky 6 so well. No more having to click on revese X when you flip the meridian or have to put in the Dec inn CCDsoft. All done automatically. Home positon is great as well.
Mine already had PEC curve in it so I haven't updated that yet. I am sure it isn't too hard.
T point is very good. But I am not sure it is 100% accurate everytime for polar alignment. I did a drift alignment first through the CCD. Then Tpoint
6 point model and did the adjustments it recommended for adjusting polar alignment.
One point, if the roof is closed don't turn on your computer and the mount. It may start up automatically and start to go to home position or at least that seemed to happen to me once. Luckily I had the roof open. Now I open the roof before I turn on the computer just in case it has ideas of taking off before I tell it to!
I also had a weird experience with it recently.
I had it all perfectly balanced and polar aligned to a very close degree. I bumped my head a couple of times on my scope which is kind of high up but does not fully clear my head!!. All of a sudden my goto's are way off, my autoguiding is absolutely gone and inaccurate. I was wondering if the rains had caused shift like Fred has had happened.
After many hours of redoing Tpoint models and redrift aligning the mount, changing over my guide camera, callibrating several times it seemed to boil down to I had installed a plug in to do dithering. It seemed to be also active on the autoguider instead of only the main camera. So after every guide exposure it shifted the mount 1 or 2 pixels in a spiral pattern!
I also found balancing the scope is not as critical on the PME as other mounts. It seems very strong and capable.
Apart from that it is a turn on and get great round stars guiding everytime.
I also use the joystick to centre the objects in the images. You need to move it a small amount and very briefly. With my joystick one side seems more sensitive than the other so it can send the object much further than expected one side than the other. A minor thing.
The mount makes weird electronic noises like a fax machine. Apparently that is normal. It took a bit of getting used to after the nice quiet NJP mount.
For connecting the autoguider to the computer select "direct guide" in the CCDsoft autoguide dialogue box menu. That way you do not need another cable from the autoguider to the mount just the USB cable from
the autoguider to the computer and the computer USB cable to the mount.
I used the Chuck Faranda driver for the Tak Temma mounts and that has a park option, it also has a timer which I used all the time. I need a simple application that has a timer to turn the tracking off or turn the mount off when programming an imaging run. Otherwise its a problem in the morning to get out there and turn it off before it flips the scope upside down. Another way of achieving that would be to program in the mount limits properly which I haven't done for the western side of the meridian.
I was thinking of getting a power point timer from Bunnings so I can have a physical turn the power off at a certain time to be sure in case I sleep in and it keeps in tracking too far.
Greg.
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