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Setting limits??
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Dick C
I just got the AP 1100 AE, and am already stuck. I bought it with the hand control although I will use it remotely 90% of the time. I have read all three 70-page manuals--twice-- and have watched two videos on how to use APCC. None of these adequately explain how to set limits, which should be simple. Or my brain is simply incapable of understanding. The limits you want to set are PHYSICAL limits to prevent the telescope from striking the pier or tripod. Page 34 of the keypad manual says you just turn limits on or off (without saying how to set them first) and then confuses this issue with "meridian limits" which is a different issue. (And that graph/diagram in APCC is confusing and I don't know how to interpret it.) In an Ideal world all you should have to do is slew the telescope to within 2 inches of the pier and push a button that says "don't go beyond this". And do that for the east and west sides of the pier. And the manual says it's talking about tracking limits, not slewing limits, without explaining how to do either and without conceding they are the same! You don't care whether your telescope banged against the pier during slewing or during tracking-- you don't want it to bang against the pier in either case. So it's one limit and it's a physical limit, but how do you set it/them? And you need to have several completely different sets of limits, one for a pier and one for a tripod, for each telescope you will use on the mount (SCT vs. refractor). So how do you set up different sets of physical limits to prevent the telescope from striking the pier? |
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Hi Dick First let me start with the simple answer: You can use just the RA limits on the AE tab to set your physical RA limit.  To determine the minutes from Meridian before enabling the RA Limits, the easiest to do is to use the keys (or keypad) to slew your scope to the point where you want to set a limit (it should be the most conservative point). Then with APCC connected you can click on "LST" in telescope position, and it will switch to HA (hour angle) and tell you your minutes past meridian to enter In my example below, it shows 21 minutes past meridian  that is the value i would enter for fixed RA limit (to keep it simple you can use the same value in both east and west, or you can measure them separately)  that's all there is to it The longer answer is that Astro-Physics mounts allow you to do so much more than just set a simple limit: you can optimize your limits based on the Dec position, so if you are imaging a target where the camera clears the pier, you could image much longer without requiring a meridian flip. It's a great feature (custom meridian tracking limits). However, I definitely see that setting simple things may not be obviously simple I hope this helps - if you need any additional help feel free to direct message me Brian On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 4:15 PM Dick C <dixiemail123@...> wrote:
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Brian Brian Valente astro portfolio https://www.brianvalentephotography.com/astrophotography/ portfolio brianvalentephotography.com |
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Jeff Kaufman
Thanks Brian for responding to Dick on this issue. I was confused as well. I didn't realize you can click LST to get HA past the meridian. That is really helpful. I was just making a best guess.
Also, I had some problems getting this to work at first. Perhaps Dick and others will find this useful. Here is what I learned. After you set the RA offsets as you describe and hit the 'set-limits' button, and enable the slider to ON, it works really well. However, if you shut-down APCC and then restart without saving the APCC settings as a whole, I notice then those limits will show-up in the windows as shown when you restart APCC, but they are NOT enabled on the mount. This really confused me. At least they were not enabled for me notwithstanding that they show as entered and the slider turned ON. To get them to work again, I had to hit the 'set-limits' button again. I also notice that if you set the limits by hitting the 'set-limits' button, save the APCC settings (from FILE-->Save (or whatever that is named from the File menu) before shutting down...then when you restart APCC and File-->Load the last settings it works great! I hope this helps those having the same issue. -Jeff |
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Tom Blahovici
I'm about to do the same thing. I would suggest that this is a bug and a serious one at that.
If you didn't know this, you could damage equipment. Tom |
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Hi Dick
I don't remember if it was you or someone else, but I sent the older version of the keypad manual (v4.19.3 from 2016) which has a much more detailed description on safe limits and how to set them. I am not sure that the newer keypad software has the same functionality though. See page 39 in the 2016 version of the manual. I have a couple comments on the safe limits because I misunderstood how they are intended to work. When I originally set up safe limits for my mount, I was mistakenly under the impression that the mount would not move the scope through the safe limits, and that if I was doing a slew to an object, it would navigate around the limits that I had set. This is not the case. The safe limits will only keep you from slewing to an object that is inside the limits, but they will not prevent the scope from slewing right through the area that you have designated as a safe limit, and they will not stop the mount from tracking into the pier if you are doing a guided exposure. I am not sure if what I described makes sense. I can't point my scope at the zenith because it will crash into the pier, so in my case, I set a safe zone of 12 degrees. Now let's say that I am looking at an object in the southern part of the sky at the same RA as the zenith, and now, I want to slew to an object at the same RA in the northern part of the sky. So, when I hit the GoTo button on the keypad or APCC, the scope sill slew directly from the southern object to the northern object by running the Declination motor, and in doing so it will slew right past the zenith, causing a pier crash. I hope this helps. Mike |
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fernandorivera3
My mount is 1200 GTO from July 2009. It's got the CP3 box with V1 chip. I have set horizon limits of 20 degrees <I think, would need to double check to make sure>. Meaning for the mount to avoid pointing the telescope to objects below 20 degrees over the horizon. It usually works fine; however sometimes the scope still dives under the limit. No crash into the tripod is possible with my current setup.
Still can't figure out why the mount on some occasions will do a GOTO for an object below my set horizon limit. BTW I only use the keypad hand controller version 4.19.3 firmware for mount control. Not Sky Safari Pro with smartphone or tablet. No APCC or any other software from a computer either. Fernando |
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