First night out with homemade computerised Mount

[Astroman (Andrew Wall)]

Well, I finally got the scope out and connected all the computers to it (2 in all) and fired it up, Once I had run the SolarSys program which works with Mel Bartels scope.exe program, after a little waiting it finished and I was able to load scope.exe and firied up the drives. I checked I was pointing at north then told the scope to goto the moon. Interesting the scope pointed to the west and this was at 7pm. hmmm something wrong there. I reran the Solarsys program several times but the scope still went the oppsite part of the sky. By this time rain had set in and the sky was overcast.

I finally tracked the problem down to human error, I had entered the date in as 2005 not 2006, geez some habits are hard to break. After fixing my problem and running the solarsys program again and loading up the scope program for the 15th time, The scope slewed over to where the moon was meant to be. I waited for it to come out of the cloud, but it wasnt going to.

I decided to hook the laptop upto the drive computer using a null modem cable and try out the lx200 commands. I tested three programs Skymap Pro 8, Starry Night Pro 4 and Thesky 5, I connected to Skymap pro first, not a problem, this program always worked well, with the scope moving where the program showed it to be going. Next I tried Starry night, well using the ascom drives I connected the scope and slewed, but at the end of the slew it came up with a messgae that connection had been lost. Did this a few times and I am still none the wiser why?. I tried out the sky, but it only connects upto COM4 and my USB adapter was on COM5 typical. Not sure if changing USB ports will change this???

I went back to skymap pro and played around with the scope pointing at different spots, then called it a night. Packed the scope up but it started raining again so I had to wait till the rain stopped so I could move the scope back into the shed.

All testing was done under a patio so it wasnt getting wet.

I will try again tonight, as the forecast is for clearer skies. I have some noise and vibration issues to fix first though.

[wavelandscott (Scott)]

Sounds/Reads like you are making good progress on this project...I enjoy reading about your experiences in building a click buzz...

I am not particularly handy at "fixing" stuff myself and I find your post a bit inspirational...keep up the good work. I am sure it will pay off in the end.

Hope you get some clear skies to work under...

[asimov (John)]

Yes very inspirational indeed. Not being electrically/computer minded I'd be totally out of me depth building something like that!

Nice & clear here at present, a bit of wind but should die out at sunset, from what I can make of the jetstream map (which turns out to be wrong 50% of the time) it won't be too bad a night as far as that go's, touch wood.

Happy testing.

[davidpretorius]

having reinstalled my dell laptop, it now talks to my dob driver II.

So i recalibrated both axis during lunch. It was sunny at lunch.

It is now cloudy and overcast!!!!

So i can't test if it is more accurate with the goto!!

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

Andrew, good luck with it!

Which part is the Home-made part?

[Astroman (Andrew Wall)]

All is home made except I didnt make the components, worm drive or motors.

Having some success right now pointing at the moon then slewing to sirius then mars, some errors but I havent initialised the thing yet. Its putting the objects in the finderscope which is somthing I guess.

Clear as a bell here now, no wind, beautiful. gonna be a loooooooong night.

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

I would love to see a pic of your handiwork Andrew. I love checking out home-made stuff!

[Astroman (Andrew Wall)]

I'll see what I can do now, it's not that good looking, more like an ugly duckling of sorts. OH I have major movements in ALT too so I stuck a weight on the back to minimise movements. Almost time to try an initialisation on it, just need canopus to shine

BTW this is my first time trying out GOTO initialisations, all other times I have used goto scopes they have been aligned and commercially built. So this is going to be interesting.

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

You have my mind ticking over!!! Homemade GoTo! Hmmm, yummy.

[Astroman (Andrew Wall)]

OKay come back inside now after spending a little time sorting things out, don't ya love it when things go smoothly. I first tried out the scope basically as was, tried goto and didnt get very far,soI sat down and went through the alignment feature, well it didnt like that it kept saying I had to initialise the scope before I could initialise it :confuse:

I ended up doing the initialisations manually, goto data select star, move to star and centre, press Init#1, goto number 2 star centre it, press init#2. okay that good how does goto go then, slew to M42, okay scope slews and there was M42 on the corner of the eyepiece. So I centred it, told the program I was looking at it and reset the coords. Slew to Sirius, WHOA way off hmmmmmm. Okay restart.

Start at 0 alt 0 az did three star alignment on Alpha Tau, Sirius and Formahult(sp?) slewed to m42. smack bang in the middle, slewed to sirius, bang in the middle again, slewtom46, there it is slightly off the centre, slew tom45, there it is in the finder, too big for eyepiece. I wasimpressed, slewedover to the 8burst neb, and the slew finished but program halted but the nmbers were still hmmm interesting. After restarting a few times I finally gave up,there is a littlebug causing the program to do weird things when I slewto the opposite side of the sky. Will investigate this.

Cant wait to have NO moon to see more objects. With moon out made viewing some of the fainter objects almost impossible.

Oh one other thing I have to work on reduction of noise and vibration while tracking, at low power was fine but looking at mars at 222x proved almost impossible because of the vibration. stars came out as little dohnuts no matter how much I focused them.

Oh well. off to bed, didnt have an afternoon nap so my night ends early .

[beren]

top work Andrew , good luck with it , be interesting to read progress