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HEQ5Pro probs, or am I being dumb.............


leemanley

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So last night I found myself with beautiful clear skies and no worries of work commitments, with this in mind I planned a great nights imaging, however, things soon took a downward turn..............

I began setting up with my tried and tested routine, the mount has marked positions for bang on PA everytime it goes out, when I powered up the mount, I noticed a slight delay in the initial beep you get, didn't think too much of it at the time, just thought it was a bit odd. 

Next comes the normal 3 star align, this is where my problems started.

I chose the first star, Caph, the mount began to position itself, heading in the right path and then pausing and deciding to go in the opposite direction, hmmm, very odd. Turned off the mount for a couple of mins then repowered. Chose a different star, Deneb, ok, heading for it, the mount lands around 2 degrees away to the east of Deneb, without the 'located' beep you get, I then noticed that I could here the motor gently whirring away and in the EP I could see the heavens steadily drifting down to the ground. How odd is that !

I tried rebooting the mount several times without any luck, checking all settings, no tracking initiated, everything I could think of.

I'm starting to think my mount is about to die !

Is there anything blindingly obvious that I could have overseen or has anybody experienced anything such as this ?

Would really appreciate your help with this, I await with baited breath...............................

Thanks, Lee

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What did you choose when it asked you "Start from park"; Yes or No?

As a note, I mark my tripod points too for a rough polar scope alignment each time but that's not accurate enough for full PA.  I run the full software PA routine every time.  I also dispensed with 3 star alignment as it appears this is not the best for PA (but ok for cone error if your set up suffers from that).  I now always use the 2 star alignment on ONE side of the meridian first (obviously the side you intend to image).

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I also dispensed with 3 star alignment as it appears this is not the best for PA (but ok for cone error if your set up suffers from that).  I now always use the 2 star alignment on ONE side of the meridian first (obviously the side you intend to image).

That's interesting.  I hope this isn't too far off topic, but could you please expand on the 3 star alignment not being the best for PA?  I always do 3 star over 2 star because...well..because it's more, innit, so must be better, innit?  A logical explanation would be appreciated :-)

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i have had simular problems in the past with powering the mount, if your running of battery then even a slightly flat battery can send it funny, when slewing watch the red light on the mount, if it flickers then it`s a power issue. i try to always run my mount now from the mains

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That's interesting.  I hope this isn't too far off topic, but could you please expand on the 3 star alignment not being the best for PA?  I always do 3 star over 2 star because...well..because it's more, innit, so must be better, innit?  A logical explanation would be appreciated :-)

Cannot really help as I do not have the mount, but about 18 months back many attempts with 3 star alignment failed almost every time. When the people did a 2 star alignment everything was fine and everything worked.

The 3 star option appears to be to determine the "cone angle" - not a clue what it is or the relevance. However doing it seemed to be the problem. I half suspect that the allowed tolerence was just too tight and so more failures were reported in "Alignment Success/Failure".

I also half recall reading that Skywatcher updated the 3 star alignment software aspect in one of their firmware updates. Think about 2 versions ago. So if you are running a new version of the software then you may find that 3 star alignment poses no problems.

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That's interesting.  I hope this isn't too far off topic, but could you please expand on the 3 star alignment not being the best for PA?  I always do 3 star over 2 star because...well..because it's more, innit, so must be better, innit?  A logical explanation would be appreciated :-)

Hi. I'm not as technically adept as a lot of folk on here so I can't give you a full explanation. However, I will happily relate evidence and personal experience when I have it. Having owned the HEQ5 pro for 7 years and researched the best methods of working it my accumulated advice on PA is as follows. Running a 3 star alignment, which inherently includes stars either side of the meridian works extremely well for stablishing a GOTO platform for your scope. Great for visual work. It also takes care of cone error if you have that issue. I don't believe I do. If I run a PA routine next, the MEL/MAZ errors reported are always huge. For imaging I find that asking the software to deal with a smaller amount of sky on the SAME side of the meridian works much better. The MEL/MAZ errors are much smaller, the number of iterations required to establish a satisfactory level of PA error [<30"] is much less ( usually 2 or 3) and thus I end up fiddling about less. I have a shortlist of target stars listed by season and either E/W and with a decent amount of RA/Dec to separate them.

One day I will migrate to armchair software but for now I like a challenge, I prefer Macs ( immensely) And my pockets are not infinite. :-)

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Thanks for the replies, I am powering with a single socket extension lead, which I've used with the mount with no problems for 2 years, I may go and buy a new one just in case there's an issue with it.
I've always used 3 star align methods, 2 on one side of the meridian and one on the other, think I read somewhere ages ago that it gave the mount a much broader perception of the sky. There have been the odd few times where nothing would work together but we all have them nights, this is something totally different and pretty scary !

The handset is running v3.35 firmware, and I start from scratch, never use start from park by the way.

Thanks, Lee

 

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