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  2. AP 1200 tracking

Re: AP 1200 tracking

John Winfield
 

Yep, I use the full crosshairs align on PAM as well, but it's tricky
if your initial pointing is bad enough that the bright star you're
supposed to be centering starts off screen.
There's no directional indicator of which way you're supposed to be
moving the stars on screen, plus you've no way of knowing if you
overshoot.
Tricky problems, but not insurmountable - they could add a "platesolve
now" button which updated the movement instructions to give you an
idea of how much further you have to move.

John

--- In ap-gto@..., "eja24601" <eja24601@...> wrote:

Hi Dean,

Congrats! I hope to have my AP1200 up and running. Some day....

I use PAM all the time to refine the (already wonderful) initial
polar alignment of my (cough) Takahashi EM200 (sorry) using exactly
the method you describe. Note that you need to use the physical
alt/az adjusters to make the necessary adjustments in the mount, not
the keypad. Anyways, if you have any question about this method,
feel free to ask, on or off-list.

Eric

--- In ap-gto@..., "Dean Salman" <cluster@> wrote:

Well I got a nice suprise last night when using CCD Commander. I
let
the program do what it wanted to get the exposure for the guide
star
through the H-Alpha filter and it was around 18 second exposure.
The
tracking was perfect with the largest error reported 0.2 I did
use PAM
to polar align and was within 50 arc seconds in both directions,
so
that helped.

As for PAM, I am not having much luck in using the crosshairs
method
and moving the mount to polar align. Darrell told me he just does
a
run and make an adjustment. Then stop PAM and run it again. This
worked very well and only took about 15 minutes. Has anyone took
PAM
through th complete run using the Next button and the crosshair
method
to make adjustments in the alignment (you have to have used PAM
this
way to know what I am talking about)

I still want to try the Pempro 2.0 alignemnt feature. It seems
drift
alignment is better over all and can be done using only one star.
I
have started drift alignment 15 minutes after sunset (doing it the
old
way)

Dean
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