Quote:
Originally Posted by toc
With the Park position - Ioptron support told me that you cannot park in the Zero position - you need to be slightly off Zero before it will park. Iv'e confirmed this behavior.
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I never got a response from iOptron but I did work that one out for myself. At the time the commander software tended to "loose" park positions including custom ones and default to what is a very strange (But safe) park position, so in Voyager I was sending it home instead of parking it. It seems to retain your selected park position properly now so I park it in one of the pre defined ones as I got used to it parking there. The trap to sending it to the home position instead of parking it is if the guider is not shut down and sends a guide pulse it restarts tracking! I came up with a work around in a Voyager script to ensure that the guider was stopped any time it was sent home, but when parked it does not respond to guide commands or restart tracking.
The default park position if it lost it's brains is 0-0 alt-az which would make sense in the northern hemisphere, but here it results in the scope being parked with the counterweight bar horizontal, scope on the east side of the pier and pointed backwards!
I have found the ipolar to be accurate enough to avoid field rotation with 20 minute subs at 1100mm focal length. The fiddly attachment method to the pier does not honestly bug me though moving the altitude locks 10mm would be better. I cut the handle off a long, ball headed allan key and that makes it easy to start the bolts, only needing the original to finally tighten them. Funny enough I never noticed the saddle bolts being a pain on the side they are, but now I think on it it would be easier of they were on the other side. I tend to stand on the east side of the mount and hold the scope with my left hand, reaching around to the far side with my right to do them up.