HEQ5 owners who regularly move their mounts...

[tlgerdes (Trevor)]

Yeah, it's all OK 99.999% of the time, then one day, someone starts talking to as you are breaking it down, and you forget to tighten. You take the counterweight of the the bar and watch as you scope goes swinging around and as you still have the counterweight in you hand, your brain has a seizure over, do I drop the counterweight on my foot and catch the scope? or do watch the scope go crash and save my foot?

[phxbird (Paul)]

Sorry Grant I haven't checked this for awhile. I did not get a hand controller when I bought the Sirius used. So I use an EQ-Mod cord to hook up the mount to my laptop. There it uses ASCOM and another freeware program EQASCOM to connect with The Sky 6 Pro. Part of the EQASCOM is a polar align program. You position the scope in the 6 o clock position (counter shaft straight down) punch up the The Sky and EQASCOM, hit the polar align button on the screen and it will rotate the mount to the proper alignment in the polar scope. You then put Polaris in the circle( northern observer, what can I say) by adjusting the mounting and you got it. Very handy and pretty accurate. I am in the process of building an observatory so won't need this step at all soon but it is still nice.
Paul