Achieving a good EQMOD star alignment with EQ6+Stellarium

[mldee (Mike)]

Well, here's another newbie alignment post........fancy that

All is set up and functioning well, C8 with 9x50 R/A finder scope, 12mm illum reticle EP, EQ6 via direct USB-TTL cable to dedicatd PC. Stellarium scope, EQMOD V1.16, stellarium 0.10.2. All work fine, can slew, park, command Stellarium Go to, etc, etc. Fixed mount, solid scope mechanical setup. I just cant get the darn EQMOD goto setup to align.

I've tried 1 star, N star, reset the data and started all over, etc, etc. Tonight was trying drift alignment as per the IIS procedures so as to get an exact SCP alignment.

It just seems to me that ALL of the written procedures seem to have a gotcha in them in the form of assumptions of things you know. I'm sure it's just me, but that doesn't help.

eg; in Drift alignment: 'set the reticle to align with the mount NSEW' - How do you do this when the scope is pointed nearly vertical at a North star near the meridian?

When doing a drift alignment, is the mount supposed to be in any form of tracking mode or not?

Before doing a standard EQMOD goto alignment; how do you know the time is correctly synchronised with the PC? Are the site coordinates shown in dd.mm.ss or dd.dec? There are no pointers to tell you. Since it only shows DD.XX, I presume any closer accuracy is pointless, as in theory the goto algorithm corrects for it after alignment...if I could make it work.

And so on. Fairly frustrating for me anyway.

If somebody has the patience to go though the steps with me and point out what I'm doing wrong or not doing, I would be most grateful.

I'd still be outside trying, but the clouds have come.....

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Mike - I'm also in Brissie and using a similar setup - happy to give you a hand if you want.

Peter

[mldee (Mike)]

Originally Posted by peter_4059

Mike - I'm also in Brissie and using a similar setup - happy to give you a hand if you want.

Peter

Hi Peter,
Would appreciate any help you may be able to offer. I don't want to clog up the forum with useless info and questions, but please let me know what sort of feedback you would like to hear. I can also email or PM you if that's more convenient.

I'm way out in the western suburbs, Mt Crosby.

Cheers

[mldee (Mike)]

Originally Posted by mldee

Hi Peter,
Would appreciate any help you may be able to offer. I don't want to clog up the forum with useless info and questions, but please let me know what sort of feedback you would like to hear. I can also email or PM you if that's more convenient.

I'm way out in the western suburbs, Mt Crosby.

Cheers

Thanks to Peter_4059, I'm on my way with drift alignment. His eminently useful suggestion was to do the alignment with video rather than an EP.

So I used my 1000d liveview on the PC monitor, plus my finderscope for coarse alignment to a star.

Extremely convenient, and mount adjustment became quite simple when you could keep an eye on the star. I would suspect that using an el cheapo webcam and one of the free programs with electronic reticule would be even easier.

Clear skies last night, so played around for hours.

Strong recommendation for other newbies to explore this route

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Mike - good to hear it worked - did the tip for working out which way north was on the laptop screen work?

I was thinking about your other post about Stellarium. I don't use it but was wondering if it supported sync? If not you should consider using something that does for use with EQMOD as it makes setting up and refining the goto pointing model so much easier. CDC is a good (free) option.

Peter

[mldee (Mike)]

Originally Posted by peter_4059

Mike - good to hear it worked - did the tip for working out which way north was on the laptop screen work?

I was thinking about your other post about Stellarium. I don't use it but was wondering if it supported sync? If not you should consider using something that does for use with EQMOD as it makes setting up and refining the goto pointing model so much easier. CDC is a good (free) option.

Peter

I must confess I still got confused with direction for the North South bit, but being able to see the star on the PC screen made it so easy to align the EW and NS slew movements and then just gently move the mount direction, it didn't matter. After about 3 or 4 nudges, I knew which was the correct way.

I tried CDC, it's a nice program, very complete, but I just don't care for the sky presentation compared to Stellarium.

Stellarium does have a sync function, it's just less user friendly to access as documentation is quite sparse in that area. Now I've read the EQMOD docs, I can still use the alternative dialog box method there as well, which I was unaware of last night. so we'll see how things go.