[Paul Haese]

Over the last couple of months I have been trying to sort out the pointing on my PME. With the help of Marcus I eventually decided to buy CCDsoft and augment it with The Sky6, Tpoint and Automapper II. Once I sorted a few minor settings I found that all this software works well together and actually performs the mapping quite well.

However several things have been concerning me.

First, I get quite a few errors with regard to either WSC not being used or pattern is not being recognised. Typically I am getting 48 errors for every 82 accepted on the plate solve. I am using 20 seconds per image and then auto dark subtraction. Do I need vary the gain, or is this to do with the number of stars in AutomapperII or something else completely?

Next, once I have completed a mapping run I am not able to get polar alignment really fantastic. I think it is good but not fantastic. See image below. For polar alignment I have done 5 runs with 20 map points per run. Then I did 2 at 30. Yet the previous run to this I was required to move 3 ticks in each axis. What am I doing wrong here? This polar alignment looks good but I have rejected 7 map points to get it looking like this at present. Two points were just terrible and obviously incorrectly mapped.

The of course is the final and most troubling problem. No matter what I do I just cannot get my RMS pointing accuracy below 100. I wonder if the pattern shown in the image is indicative of an orthagonality issue or something else? To be honest my pointing when I did a manual mapping run was near 100 and this is the best I can do with this data.

What I really need is some advise from guys in the know, I am really stuck (I normally can nut this sort of stuff out, but this time I just don't know what to do) and need help.