Maxim DL Plate Soving and Parking scope

[PatrickGilliland]

Hi

Couple more questions.

1.  I used Maxim to pinpoint star then overlayed image.  I could not see how to get scope to slew to the image pinpointed.  Co-ordinates set in telescope tab did not correlate?  Can anyone advise on the required steps after pinpoint and overlaying to complete a plate solve so that I can image same object as previous night?  Appreciate this is fairly obvious to the experienced people out there but could not find any logical way of doing.

2. Parking scope at end of sequence - is there an easy way to do this?  I can see you can use scripts but I know nothing about programming my own.  Any advise on how I could turn of guiding and ideally park scope at end of session would be appreciated.

Thanks

Paddy

[Martin-Devon]

Hi Paddy, I'd be interested to know the answer to your first query as well. I see that there are "Center on image" and "Image center from Pinpoint" tabs under the Telescope menus, but I've never go these to work properly in Maxim - probably just me though. Instead I just use AstroTortilla to go to a previous image, and it gets me there spot-on every time, then I boot up & use Maxim,

For the 2nd question there is a "Park" command in Maxim also under the Telescope menu - this works fine if you manually click on it. If you want to park your mount at the end of a sequence, and have the guider turned off at the same time - all in automated mode - then there are good software packages out there that will do this. I use CCD Commander and at the end of the imaging run, it turns off the guider, let's the CCD warm up & parks the mount all automated. I believe Sequence Generator pro will do the same, and no doubt more expensive automation packages will do likewise.

HTH,

Martin

[PatrickGilliland]

Thanks Martin,

If I am not mistaken the CCD suite of software is very expensive so not an option, I read Maxim DL 6 may support so may have to go for upgrade.  Was hoping to find a non-expense related answer though.

Have astrotortilla installed so will give that a go as well.

Hopefully someone can provide and answer and save us both some headaches!

Paddy

[Martin-Devon]

Paddy, don't get CCD Commander mixed up with CCDWare software, they are different. A one-off license for CCD Commander is $99, and it integrates seamlessly with Maxim, FocusMax, Pinpoint etc. 

[PatrickGilliland]

Ah, thanks Martin, now that is a different scenario

Downloading the 45 day trial now which is even better.

Paddy