After some horrible movements in the mount and some nice crunching sounds, I am FINALLY going to attack mine with a screwdriver today.
I am not bothering with pre-tune results, but http://completelyserious.com/pics/mountts/IMG_4672.JPG should give you a rough idea of how bad the movements are. (This is a guided shot, while tracking the stars will occasionally jump around in the eyepiece).
After some horrible movements in the mount and some nice crunching sounds, I am FINALLY going to attack mine with a screwdriver today.
I am not bothering with pre-tune results, but http://completelyserious.com/pics/mountts/IMG_4672.JPG should give you a rough idea of how bad the movements are. (This is a guided shot, while tracking the stars will occasionally jump around in the eyepiece).
Fingers crossed it doesn't go completely wrong..
I never had anything that bad. An example is here http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/a...3&d=1314621407
This was taken at 1800mm fl with 120 sec and 300 sec exposures. My guideing is a guide scope using 0.3 sec exposures and guidemaster. The pic isn't anything to write home about but certainly shows nice round stars.
Does anybody know exactly how to employ the PEC to the eqmod, because every time i tried it followed PEC curve.... Inverted not inverted nothing mud skippa
did you set the gain on the PEC to 1 after loading the file?
Does anybody know exactly how to employ the PEC to the eqmod, because every time i tried it followed PEC curve.... Inverted not inverted nothing mud skippa
I tried it also but gave up as it seems to have limited use. It needs to use the pulse drive to record it and I always used the direct connection to the mount from my guider. Pulse guide was much more flakey than the direct connection.
If you are guideing anyway the PE will guide out.
Ill have to have a look at that Osiris, I believe that its following the PEC map because I wanted to see how well it did with the PEC in place while i recored the new map. but it followed the PEC graph almost to the letter which is odd and at the end of the day the PE was far worse!
I havn't run with PEC to this day so i know it works without it but if i can make it work better then why not try
It will follow the PEC but not do anything if the gain is off. Set to 1 is 1to1 ratio of correction. I gather ya used PECPrep to create the file for eqmod.
What i mean by it follows the PEC, it actually follows the PEC curve so when the pec is going down its going down when its up its going up and its doing it nigh on perfectly
Ill check the 1 for 1 thing because i know that eqmod allows for that kind of adjustment. Thanks for the update on that
I'm pretty sure PECPrep is the only (native) EQMOD solution that will automatically sync the PEC with your steppers Brendan. If you use any other program you have to click the TimeStamp button on the EQMOD driver at the same time you stop recording data. This presumeably writes data somewhere to show where your steppers were at that moment so that when you next load up your PEC it will start at the right point. I've done this when I recorded my PE data via Maxim and it worked ok.
Perhaps you just happened to be roughly half a cycle out of step when you fired it up?
Thanks for that post, I had been going to PM you regarding the EQ6 and what, if any, work had been done to it. Last night was it's first "real" use since I got it and due to our location, I spent a lot of time trying (unsuccesfully) to get it aligned. Unfortunately, Crux is currently dissapearing behind a ridge fairly early AND even with a dew shield, I found I'm going to have to get some heaters for my C9.25.
Oh, and I hate city lights.............can't wait to get a weekend at our place up the coast.
Chris
Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry B
I recently sold my EQ6pro and replaced it with a Tak NJP.
The tak is a bit more noisy but is much more solid. The EQ6 did have a fair bit of periodic error but I could always guide it out using guidemaster. I never bothered stripping it apart as it was good enough for what I used as is. All in all it was a good mount. The Tak is lots better but you would expect it to be for the cost.
. . . and now 'Live' Astrocasts it has NEVER let me down . .
Something I forgot to mention, now that I am doing Video Astronomy, my EQ6 is so good I don't even use guiding any more.
I only go to a maximum of about 2 minutes with the faintest of objects, but most objects I integrate the live video around the 5 to 15 seconds mark. No real need for guiding at that length of integration.
And being live video no-one worries about any movement anyway as it is expected
In fact if it does show any movement it just proves that it is 'live'
Steve I could almost garantee that with the right adjustments your poor proforming EQ6 would proform just fine. I remember doing PE run on my mount in the dark old days and it was somewhere about 25 arc seconds Pk-Pk with soul destroying backlash and a crunching sound that can only be likend to a learner driver on their first crack at changing gears.!
Quote:
Originally Posted by stevous67
Hi Brendan,
Nicely introduced thread with more than sufficient information to start. Bizarre? Hmmmm.
I have a mothballed EQ6 which I'll never sell because of it's past performance.
Cheers
Steve
Rob, you could be spot on the fazhissle there. but im not really fussed as its proforming just outside losmandy G11 standard specs... +-5 arc seconds and my guiding at 1200mm FL sits nicely within +-.5 pixels. Happy days mate!
Quote:
Originally Posted by RobF
I'm pretty sure PECPrep is the only (native) EQMOD solution that will automatically sync the PEC with your steppers Brendan. If you use any other program you have to click the TimeStamp button on the EQMOD driver at the same time you stop recording data. This presumeably writes data somewhere to show where your steppers were at that moment so that when you next load up your PEC it will start at the right point. I've done this when I recorded my PE data via Maxim and it worked ok.
Perhaps you just happened to be roughly half a cycle out of step when you fired it up?
I had a bit of a funny night tonight, Set out to use alignmaster for the first time and then after decided to do some helix images. I actually left my focusing mask on the scope for all of my 10 minute subs......... So my images were of the helix nebula and spikey stars.
I did manage to get a screen cap of my tracking though. Remember that I use a finder guider so small deviation in the graph is more movement than people guiding at longer FL
Took a little screen dump of my imaging session on sat night to show what kind of stars i guide on before i did the needed adjustments to bring the guider into focus (they are still little sausages), the genreal guiding graph, and a 900 second (15min) shot looks like. Hope you guys find it useful
Edit: Just to give you an idea of the guiding in Here number three, the graph scale is 6 minutes in length and +-0.5 pixels then just under that it shows the numerical values of the guiding adjustment. If your so inclined my pixel scale is 0.93 seconds of arc per pixel so times the error by the pixel scale and thats the arc second error. And generally that is well below the seeing limits.
Last edited by bmitchell82; 21-11-2011 at 11:56 AM.
So my images were of the helix nebula and spikey stars. 
thats how mine used to look hehehe. Bugger on the Focus mask thats just sadening!
