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New Beta Synscan polar alignment
Hi,
Despite several previous attempts (which ended with cloud, power failures, and general slacking on my part) last week was the first time I have been able to have a really good go with this Beta feature. Instead of observing, I spend the whole night playing around with it, trying to provoke a bug somewhere, using various stars and 2-star and 3-star alignment first up.
First I leveled the mount, and aligned it roughly with a compass, and set the altitude with a bubble level. I have read that not all of this is really necessary, but that is an experiment for next week.
As advertised V2 of this Beta works in our hemisphere, and it did quite well. It performed best if I did a 3-star alignment initially, but often that can fail first time, so I settled on a 2-star alignment, followed by homing, and then a 3-star alignment.
Then on selecting Polar Alignment, and a star from the restricted list it gives, the mount slewed to this position. It was quite a way off. The misalignment in Alt and Az is reported at this time. Following the published procedure, the star was centred in the EP using the hand controller, and ENTER pressed. The mount then slewed a bit again, and reported Alt and Az misalignment. The star is now centred again, using not the hand control, but the mount mechanical adjustment screws in Alt and Az.
On repeating this Polar Alignment procedure using the same star, I noticed the reported misalignment got smaller. On the third iteration, it was reduced again. Next time it was reduced to the same order as lost motion in the mount gears due to backlash.
Further positioning around the sky was quite accurate, the equal of the best manual polar alignment I have managed to do (I have not tried drift aligning tho).
The only thing I noticed was that twice in all this jiggery-pokery the mount did not stop slewing when I released the hand control button. I have noticed that happening previously when the backlash setting was too large, but this time it was not so caused. When I tried to reproduce this "bug" deliberately, I could not. It seemed that selecting a different slew rate would correct the condition so it disappeared for a while. More experimenting ahead.
Cheers
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