Quote:
Originally Posted by midnight
G'Day Eddie,
I had similar problems a few years back when I acquired a Meade with a goto system (autostar 497) and found it very frustrating to start with. I can not speak for your model but I learnt the following leasons for my model and maybe this may or may not help you but have a look and see anyway  :
1. Alignment. When I tried to do an alignment (1, 2 or 3 star) and it failed miserably, I would undo the clutches and manually rotate the OTA back to South without powering down, lock the clutches and start again. Big mistake! When turned on, the mount was always aware of where it was from the encoders so undoing the clutches and moving back to south meant I introduced a massive error. I solved this by turning off the controller and back on when set to south if I had to repeat an alignment.
2. Time. The Meade model to my understanding can not interpolate your exact time based on a time zone and longitude. So if you enter your longitude (eg around Perth etc) and then enter the time say from your mobile phone, this time is not the true time at this longitude. For Perth, we know we are 8hr ahead of GMT but the true GMT +8hr puts this position well east of Perth. This can also result in an apparent poor targetting. One only needs to look at the local sunset times for say Newcastle and Perth which are at similar latitudes. Perth's local sunsets are always longer by upwards of nearly 20-30 minutes.
Anyway, good luck and enjoy your nights before our "wet" season arrives soon. 
Cheers,
Darrin... |
Thanks Darrin, interesting points. The Celestron does not have a clutch system. You cannot move at all in Az but there is movement in Dec which does not interfere with the settings for NEXT time, but stuffs up current settings. eg, if the object is off centre, and you move the dec manually, it screws up all other goto functions, have to use a slow slew. But seems after last night it is back to normal. However, your points re time etc are noted. No matter how accurate my lat and long are, rarely is the object after aligning anwhere near centre. Will test more.
Eddie
