the 1200 and 1600 are different, for one the 1600 has springs so the procedures are different.



Mike J. Shade: mshade@q.com

Mike J. Shade Photography:

mshadephotography.com



In War: Resolution

In Defeat: Defiance

In Victory: Magnanimity

In Peace: Goodwill

Sir Winston Churchill

Already, in the gathering dusk, a few of the stars are turning on their lights.

Vega, the brightest one, is now dropping towards the west. Can it be half

a year since I watched her April rising in the east? Low in the southwest

Antares blinks a sad farwell to fall...

Leslie Peltier, Starlight Nights



International Dark Sky Association: <http://www.darksky.org/> www.darksky.org



From: ap-gto@... [mailto:ap-gto@...]
Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2016 4:09 PM
To: ap-gto@...
Subject: Re: [ap-gto] 1600 gear mesh procedure (HOWARD)





Mike, that sounds odd. Scott Hammonds posted a video of cleaning and remeshing the gears on his 1200 GTO CP3. I'd look at that.



Stuart



On Sat, Sep 3, 2016 at 7:00 PM, 'Mike Shade' mshade@q.com [ap-gto] <ap-gto@...> wrote:



I spoke to Howard some months ago and he offered an alternate gear mesh procedure for my 1600GTO (still with CP3 and standard gear boxes). If I remember correctly, he offered putting the mount in Park 1 (counterweight shaft down, OTA pointed north), loosening the lock down screws on the gear box, and moving the mount in RA or DEC depending on the axis being adjusted, similar to the documented procedure. He offered two things though, giving the gear boxes a gentle rap or two and putting a couple of fingers (pointer and middle finger) between the bottom of the gearbox and top of the mount and then tightening the lock down screws.



Since it is some time since I have adjusted the gear mesh, I am trying to remember if this is correct. anyone have any input, or Howard if you can chime in...



Thanks...



Mike J. Shade: mshade@q.com

Mike J. Shade Photography:

mshadephotography.com



In War: Resolution

In Defeat: Defiance

In Victory: Magnanimity

In Peace: Goodwill

Sir Winston Churchill

Already, in the gathering dusk, a few of the stars are turning on their lights.

Vega, the brightest one, is now dropping towards the west. Can it be half

a year since I watched her April rising in the east? Low in the southwest

Antares blinks a sad farwell to fall...

Leslie Peltier, Starlight Nights



International Dark Sky Association: www.darksky.org <http://www.darksky.org/>









--

Stuart Heggie

http://www.stuartheggie.com/featured.html <http://www.stuartheggie.com>

--

Hi Larry,

Please contact me directly at AP at howard at astro-physics dot com.   I believe that you have done something related to your Absolute Encoders that has gotten them out of sync with the mount.   It is acting like it is hitting an encoder limit.  By any chance, did you use your clutches and forget to re-run the APAE utility?

Larry,

Reinstalling APCC will not reset the settings file, which is what you said you had edited. You should try deleting "settings.apcc" and "default.mlm", which should turn off horizon limits, Meridian limits, and homing/limits features, in case any one of those was causing the symptoms.

To find those files, start APCC, click the "Log Directory" button in the "Tools" group box on the Setup tab. Then, within the windows explorer window that appears, move up to the parent folder. It should be something like "C:&#92;ProgramData&#92;Astro-Physics&#92;APCC".

-Ray Gralak
Author of APCC (Astro-Physics Command Center): http://www.astro-physics.com/index.htm?products/accessories/software/apcc/apcc
Author of PEMPro: http://www.ccdware.com
Author of Astro-Physics V2 ASCOM Driver: http://www.gralak.com/apdriver
Author of PulseGuide: http://www.pulseguide.com
Author of Sigma: http://www.gralak.com/sigma

Hi Bryan,

I'm glad the color changes worked for you.

-Ray Gralak
Author of APCC (Astro-Physics Command Center): http://www.astro-physics.com/index.htm?products/accessories/software/apcc/apcc
Author of PEMPro: http://www.ccdware.com
Author of Astro-Physics V2 ASCOM Driver: http://www.gralak.com/apdriver
Author of PulseGuide: http://www.pulseguide.com
Author of Sigma: http://www.gralak.com/sigma

Ray

Pempro Beta 2.99.26 works fine.  Ray has changed the colors on the Acquire Data curves and the PEC curves.  

I was attracted to the sky model. That was my sole motivation for buying APCC

I work as a volunteer at Palomar Observatory. I give tours of the 200-inch Hale
Telescope. I've seen it in operation. They use a sky model. I don't know who
developed it. It might have been developed in-house, but I think they bought an off-
the-shelf product. I can probably find out. The moving part of the telescope weighs
530 tons. There is flexure. Anybody who's read up on the telescope knows about
the built-in flexure of the tube (it sags at each end by a predictable amount), and
about the expected flexure of the horseshoe bearing at the north end. There may be
other modes of flexure that I don't know about. The focal length at Cassegrain
focus, the most frequently used focus, is 81.6 meters (5.1m aperture * 16). But the
pointing of this telescope is exact. They can put an object very close to or on the slit
of a spectrograph every time. That's kind of what I'm looking for.

If that is your interest, then there are ways to improve the model. What you want to achieve is a very rigid setup that points repeatably to the same position throughout the sky. Note that this doesn't mean it points accurately, just that your setup points with the same amount of error for each respective point in the sky, every time it is pointed there. Let's call this "reliable" pointing.

APPM has a feature to check a setup's pointing reliability. I mentioned it before as a "5x verify run". APPM cycles through mapping points in the sky five times. If the pointing errors remain close for each point then the pointing model is reliable and should work well. If there is randomness in the results then mechanical improvements will be needed to achieve better results.

So, what causes unreliable pointing? Random shifts or movements in the setup, like an optical element shifting randomly, or a cable snagging on something, or loose connectors between the OTA and camera, or the mounting plate. You have to check for these things and eliminate them, or at least minimize them.

The astronomers and engineers of the 530-ton Palomar telescope have eliminated any relevant sources of random movement, so they were able to model its position precisely in the sky. A human could ride on that scope and not affect the pointing to any significant extent. However, almost any trivial thing can significantly affect pointing reliability in an amateur setup weighing several orders of magnitude less. That's the challenge you face if you want to improve pointing performance.

-Ray Gralak
Author of APCC (Astro-Physics Command Center): http://www.astro-physics.com/index.htm?products/accessories/software/apcc/apcc
Author of PEMPro: http://www.ccdware.com
Author of Astro-Physics V2 ASCOM Driver: http://www.gralak.com/apdriver
Author of PulseGuide: http://www.pulseguide.com
Author of Sigma: http://www.gralak.com/sigma

-----Original Message-----
From: ap-gto@... [mailto:ap-gto@...]
Sent: Friday, September 2, 2016 9:56 PM
To: ap-gto@...
Subject: RE: [ap-gto] Re: APCC PRO Beta 1.5.0.10 pointing correction keeping me
33 arcmin off target??

why did you purchase?

I was attracted to the sky model. That was my sole motivation for buying APCC. I
assumed, once I had it going, that the sky model would enable improved tracking,
and I was attracted to the possibility of tracking comets. I also thought, just maybe,
there would be other features that, once I saw them working, I'd wonder how I ever
got along without them. None of this has happened, at least not yet.


I work as a volunteer at Palomar Observatory. I give tours of the 200-inch Hale
Telescope. I've seen it in operation. They use a sky model. I don't know who
developed it. It might have been developed in-house, but I think they bought an off-
the-shelf product. I can probably find out. The moving part of the telescope weighs
530 tons. There is flexure. Anybody who's read up on the telescope knows about
the built-in flexure of the tube (it sags at each end by a predictable amount), and
about the expected flexure of the horseshoe bearing at the north end. There may be
other modes of flexure that I don't know about. The focal length at Cassegrain
focus, the most frequently used focus, is 81.6 meters (5.1m aperture * 16). But the
pointing of this telescope is exact. They can put an object very close to or on the slit
of a spectrograph every time. That's kind of what I'm looking for.

Thank you, Howard.

> i have unchecked "enable pointing correction" in APCC

> why did you purchase?

Larry,

I'm not sure what you did, but I think it's a bad idea deleting portions of the settings files, as it is easy to end up with a bad XML file if you make a mistake.

So, you can try deleting the "settings.apcc", and start over. However, if you have more trouble, I think you should try looking at the APCC help file to make sure you followed the procedure. If that doesn't get you going, then give George or Howard a call next week while you are in front of the computer and mount. Barring a problem with the mount, they will get you running.

-Ray Gralak
Author of APCC (Astro-Physics Command Center): http://www.astro-physics.com/index.htm?products/accessories/software/apcc/apcc
Author of PEMPro: http://www.ccdware.com
Author of Astro-Physics V2 ASCOM Driver: http://www.gralak.com/apdriver
Author of PulseGuide: http://www.pulseguide.com
Author of Sigma: http://www.gralak.com/sigma

Ray

It sounds like your setup is serving you well as is without APCC, and that’s a good thing. I think the “over the top” response feeling may come from people who do see value in APCC and who feel passionately about it. As for me, I saw significant improvements in GOTO, tracking and guiding with my permanently mounted remote setup. I still plate solve and refine, but it’s nice to be much closer on the first try for my purposes. But, most of the value for me is in better tracking and guiding improvements that cut down on the auto guider corrections that used to be required of my setup, resulting in tighter stars and nearly no lost subframes. 

* the GPS interface?
I know where my scope is. As to the other things -- no, they're not particularly useful.

This is the sort of over-the-top response I expected, and it's why I haven't said
anything since I adopted APCC in Dec 2014.

Everyone has a chance to demo APCC before purchasing. When I see posts like yours that find *no* value at all in a product, it makes me wonder if the poster understands the software very well. It's like a 1-star Amazon review that has vague reasons why a product is bad.

And, if you knew about the features I listed, but found they weren't useful to you, why did you purchase?

Of course it wouldn't, because as you said, you have a non-working pointing model.

I didn't say that.

*I* said it was a non-working model, because of the results you stated:

The pointing model isn't good enough to obviate the need for plate-solves.
I tried tracking a comet one night, using the
downloaded data from JPL, and the tracking wasn't good enough to make it worth
trying again.

I think that there could have been mechanical improvements possible that would have improved the accuracy of the model. There were also a few bug fixes to the Horizons tracking after 1.0.3.4. If you don't report a bug, we might not be aware of it and it might not get fixed.

I recently had a situation where we had some sort of power blip. Other people in the
area said it was a "surge." The scope, which had been parked (Park 4) after a night's
run, was "tracking" when I checked it in the morning.

Ok, please provide a log file so that I can see what happened.

-Ray Gralak
Author of APCC (Astro-Physics Command Center): http://www.astro-physics.com/index.htm?products/accessories/software/apcc/apcc
Author of PEMPro: http://www.ccdware.com
Author of Astro-Physics V2 ASCOM Driver: http://www.gralak.com/apdriver
Author of PulseGuide: http://www.pulseguide.com
Author of Sigma: http://www.gralak.com/sigma

-----Original Message-----
From: ap-gto@... [mailto:ap-gto@...]
Sent: Friday, September 2, 2016 3:11 PM
To: ap-gto@...
Subject: RE: [ap-gto] Re: APCC PRO Beta 1.5.0.10 pointing correction keeping me
33 arcmin off target??



This is the sort of over-the-top response I expected, and it's why I haven't said
anything since I adopted APCC in Dec 2014.

* the GPS interface?

I know where my scope is. As to the other things -- no, they're not particularly useful.
Once I've started a night's run, the scope works unattended. I usually check it a
couple of times to make sure everything is working correctly, and to see if the
accumulating images are good. A red stop-slew button doesn't mean much in that
situation. The 3D display is cute, but I merely have to look at the scope to see where
it's pointing. I also have a webcam in the observatory that tells me what I need to
know.

automatically stop tracking if the computer or application fails

I recently had a situation where we had some sort of power blip. Other people in the
area said it was a "surge." The scope, which had been parked (Park 4) after a night's
run, was "tracking" when I checked it in the morning.

Of course it wouldn't, because as you said, you have a non-working pointing model.

I didn't say that. &nb sp;I set up the pointing model according to the instructions. It
went without a hitch. That was Jan 2015. It never provided me with a reason to
believe it wasn't functioning correctly. Mine is the only installation of APCC that I've
ever seen. If it's not working correctly, I have no way to know about it.

> * the GPS interface?