And the mistake was: Human error

[Aces High (Mark)]

hello all...

After two days of cursing my brand new HEQ5 pro goto mount I finally found the problem. Human error. For the life of me I could not work out why after all the setup was perfect the telescope would point in the wrong direction when asked to find a star.. "etc"

The error was staring me in the face the whole time.

When you first turn on the controller it asks for the date, time and time zone. mm/dd/year.

I was putting the day then the month followed by the year.
So instead of having the date as the 9th of March 2020, I was really telling the hand controller it was the 3rd of September 2020.

I feel like a real fool now. LOL

And of course now that I have worked out my silly mistake the clouds have rolled in for the next four or five days.

oh the fun of being a total beginner..

[Saturnine (Jeff)]

You're not alone, a lot of us have been caught out by Skywatcher pandering to their, probably largest market, the USA, and having the date input with the month first. You do get used to it quickly and then it is mainly plain sailing and the mounts perform quite well.
From what I've seen of the weather forecasts there is a chance of some clear skies later in the week so you may get to try out the mount soon.

[JeniSkunk (Jenifur)]

Originally Posted by Aces High

Human error.
When you first turn on the controller it asks for the date, time and time zone. mm/dd/year.

Not human error on your part, Mark, but rather a design fail by the programmers, of not adhering to the Real Standards:
ISO 8601 (international), ANSI INCITS 30-1997 (R2008) and NIST FIPS PUB 4-2 (USA), GB/T 7408-2005 (China)
yyyy-mm-dd

The unofficial common use USAian date format of mm/dd/yy is not an actual standard.

oh the fun of being a total beginner..

One could say that about the coders who wrote the software driving your scope, for ignoring the ISO standards and instead going with their local non-standard.

[RyanJones]

I have to consciously think about this every single time I setup Mark. I’ve been imaging for a little over 2 years and even last night I put it in the RIGHT way around before correcting myself to the WRONG way before pressing enter.

[Aces High (Mark)]

And I thought it was just me..

I will have to be aware of this each time. Shame the dam hand set can't save the date and time in a button battery.

[Ukastronomer (Jeremy)]

"I feel like a real fool now. LOL"

DON'T

It HAS happened to us all one way or another many won't admit it, I almost threw my Celestron mount out the window, and that is true, I don't make it up, being Autistic I have done it before.

What may appear a dumb mistake is not, these days automation may appear the be all and end all, it is not.

I can not read, no I am not illiterate, I can not "sit and read" not "not read" therefore I loath instruction manuals, I posted here on this site what I could not do, and it was only thanks to some members pointing me to the "setup video" from celestron that I finally got it.


.

[Outcast (Carlton)]

Originally Posted by Aces High

And I thought it was just me..

I'd say it's probably the most common setup error there is...

I've done it & I suspect everyone else has at some point... At least Meade gave me the option for Date format... Celestron & Skywatcher.. NOPE!!

Don't sweat it too much, I dare say you'll repeat it at some stage... Been there, done that too...

[The_bluester (Paul)]

Originally Posted by Aces High

And I thought it was just me..

I will have to be aware of this each time. Shame the dam hand set can't save the date and time in a button battery.

It is/was far from just you, practically everyone in a country where it is dd/mm/yyyy has done it (Me too, on more than one occasion)

What is handy is that after the first time you will only wonder for a moment "Why are you going over there" before you realise what you have done and power off, reset to the home position and go again.

[AndyG (Andy)]

This issue bothered me sufficiently to invest in a https://stargps.ca/
I bought both Nextar and Synta cables to fit my small stable of mounts.

Later on, having moved to a mounted NUC, I gained similar convenience from a $25 Ebay USB GPS, and the simple $30 Skywatcher USB to RJ-45 adaptor.

I just wasn't in the mood for date/time/lat/long shenanigans.

[mordrax (Joe)]

If the time is before the country selected, it could explain why the time's placeholder is a default mm/dd/yyyy.

It's also unlucky you were setting it up in the first 1/3 of the month when this issue has a false positive outcome!

The simplest fix would be to show a human friendly version as you're typing it out, but yeah, the idiots that decided to mix their units up ( ie USA with their mm/dd/yyyy) has also caused programmers no end of trouble...