Hi there!

First day owning a AP mount which happens to be the Mach2GTO :)
Up until today my imaging mount was solely a 10Micron.  I bought the Mach2 to put in an observatory because having one premium mount I have been taking it down and transporting it 2 hours every time I want to do some back yard imaging or go out to the clubs star parties.

Now I have two good mounts so I don't have to do that!

Ok so I am used to doing things a different way and I think some things are pretty good ideas.  Two that come to mind first are Balancing and Polar Alignment.

As to Balancing, I am surprised that I don't find some sort of balancing tool in APCC.  Seems simple enough to sample the amp draw in both axis to see which side is heavier and then instruct the user with "scope is camera heavy" or "Scope is counterweight heavy" with some sort of % measurement.   I would have to imagine that the access to that data is there it just would need to be added.  But maybe it simply doesn't matter and balance by hand is more than fine?   You tell me.

The second thing is polar alignment.  I went into the Pointing Model tab in APCC Pro and clicked on the button (blueish color) that says APPM and it did NOT launch point mapper. I had to launch it from the desktop.  Once in there I looked around and it seems to have a lot of great information. But again, nothing that seems to indicate that it can command the mount to do something akin to The Sky X's Precise Polar Alignment where it uses the sky model to determine polar alignment error and asks you to center a star using the physical knobs. Once the star is centered, you are polar aligned.  This has been the way I did polar alignments for the last five years on a few different mounts.    Did I overlook this tool somewhere or is this simply something that nobody wants?  

How are you doing polar alignment ?  Are you all using the RAPAS?   Since I am going to be permanent on a pier I only have to do this once.   Just use Sharpcap and move on? 

I believe both of these features would be pretty nice to have and wouldn't require further software purchases.  

Thanks