Werner, The manual clearly states to use a rubber mallot to make tension adjustments to the worm, not your head! I'd guess though, that without first loosing the required fasteners, your attempt to

Hello, My new AP 1200 is mounted on a permanent pier and the R.A. motor housing is at the same altitude as my forehead when I stand next to my mount. Yesterday I checked the pier adapter knobs and I

Bien sur, Roland, et merci. That's what I eventually figured you were doing. Joe

Hmmmm, this old fart wonders if you will use the new Gear Cutting Method on the AP1200s just now entering production? We always apply new techniques to our products. They evolve, along with our

I would have started by aligning the finder to the OTA using an "illuminated cross hair eyepiece", until these two were parallel, and then go through your procedure to make the OTA/finder

Hey Joe, All you have to do is get the finder scope orthogonal at the very first. You don't need to waste time with a few tries prior to that. I believe Roland covers this in one of his more recent

Of course - NOW I see it - thanks Chuck. In essence, adjusting the "finder set screws" to make it orthogonal, is just like adding shims to the OTA for the same reason. So, if I can't get the

Hey Joe, The concept you should know here is that the OTA doesn't need to be orthogonal. You only need the finder scope orthogonal to the mount (not the OTA) in order to polar align the mount's RA

Hi Rick, In the Orthogonally section of the latest GTO Keypad manual, it states that: "especially in GEM mounts, a non-orthogonal mount will cause errors in ANY routine that uses the scope for

Happy to say the serial cable and KeySpan adapter I ordered from AP worked perfectly with my AP900 GTO. I have a new laptop running Vista and TheSky v6. Connecting to the mount went smoothly. I

I am glad Roland brought up using a finder. The whole point of the meridian flip method is to polar align the mount. Making the optics perfectly orthogonal is secondary and unnecessary. It might

Hi Rolando, I too was a bit confused, but let that slip. Now I am really confused. I understand your method and the explanation is clear, but I don't get the "initial conditions". Was the main

The production worm on this 3600 mount is made with a new gear cutting method that we developed here after much testing, and it produced a raw periodic error of under 2 arc seconds without PEM in a 5

Joe, The Helmet cam comes with the necessary attachment gear, and you don't need the DVR setup although I got one with the package I purchased.  The camera comes with the so called "DVR Travel

Roland, Great description of the process.  I have one question which probably has an obvious answer:  When you did the first iterations on Vega, you stated that it allowed you to get the finder

I am selling my wonderful AP 130 f/6 Starfire EDF from July 1996 run on Astromart Ad # 586257. If you have questions please email thru AM as my Internet is down. Thanks.

Rolando, As much as I like pursuing globulars - they are very dramatic objects - I have refrained so far from chasing them and this is due to the fact that I cannot get good overall colour for one

docsquic@... writes: When a scope (or finder in this case) is not orthogonal to the mount, it will be off by twice the orthogonal error when doing the Meridian Flip. So, using logic, one

ayiomami@... writes: It's up on the website in the Gallery section under Roland's test images. ************** Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check

Roland ... excellent and reassuring description. Just like Anthony earlier, I also saved your post as a separate text file to my AP folder, for future reference. This is definitely - another