Quote:
Originally Posted by cventer
Where about is this position roughly ? Meridian is right overhead. Celestial equator ? Do you have an example star you would use at say roughly 8:30 pm ?
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The Zenith is the point straight up directly overhead.
The Meridian is a line that runs from due North, up and over your head through the Zenith and then down through the pole to due South.
If the celestial equator runs through your Zenith, then you must live somewhere on the Earth's equator.
Image link and sync on linked image is better than syncing on a star. But you usually have to do that very first sync on a star because when you first set up, oops, raw pointing isn't usually good enough yet for image links to work.
In general, avoid synchronizing on a star that is located too near the meridian. Do not synchronize on stars above 60 degrees declination either. Where "too near the meridian" is a relative term. I stay at least five degrees or so away from it when syncing. But then I have an ME. I'm not at all sure if this is 100% applicable to the MX with it's larger zones around the meridian.
Syncing invalidates your Tpoint model. If you're used to other mounts where you sync anytime you want to improve local pointing, now is the time to
get out of that habit. If you have third party software that is set to do (real physical) syncs, turn that option off. Differential pointing with a plate solve and a jog is okay, but not syncs.
Also, in my experience ProTrack works very well only after you've mapped a lot of points and have a good model. If you've only mapped a small number of points, then my experience is that it can make things worse. In my experience it can take over 80 mapped points all over the sky before ProTrack goes from making things worse to making them better and it can take upwards of 150 points or so before it really starts to do wonders for tracking. YMMV. Fortunately automated calibration makes it very easy to quickly acquire a lot of mapped points. (You need to collect them all in the same session and same night. Can't just add more the next night or anything like that.)
I highly recommend reading the Paramount MX manual several times, then several times more. It's the best mount manual Software Bisque has ever produced. It has many years of experience distilled into it.