SynScan Hand Controller

[ehorvath]

So I got a SkyView Pro GoTo mount......love it considering it was a nightmare at first because the hand controller was WAY out of date and we had to update the firmware, and of course they only supply a cable for OLD computers but thank goodness an astronomy friend had a USB adapter!  Now my question.... While we were doing the "guided tour" a couple of the DSO's were not centered.  We done the 3-star alignment but all stars it picked were in the same 1/2 of the sky (roughly all in the southwest).  When my friend had talked to tech support once, the guy told him a trick.  If the object is not centered, because the alignment didn't pick a star in all 3 of the large sections of the sky such as one in the north, one in the southwest and one in the north east, objects can be way off in the other part of the sky.  The tech guy said to center the object using the slewing control buttons and when it is centered, press ESC once and then quickly press ESC again but this time hold it down for a couple of seconds and it will automatically remember it's cordinates and it will more reliably center other object in that portion of sky so you don't have to manually center them.  We done this and it really did work perfectly for the rest of the sky.  My question is, does anyone else know any other tricks like that which can be done with the hand controller that is NOT mentioned in the user manual?  For fun I attached a pic of my new system

[Steve Ward]

That's all covered in the manual actually , under Pointing Accuracy Enhancement (PAE) ... 

[ronin]

As Steve says it is in there but as a rule never generally made apparent. On Skywatchers it is PAE on a Meade it is Synch.

You tell the scope to goto a star - use stars never anything else - and the scope will go to the RA+Dec of that star, you then centre it - this causes the RA+Dec to alter a little, so the scope now has a slightly different set of position values then the true coordinates.

By the PAE and Sync feature you are simeply telling that the position it is at is really the RA+Dec of the star and the scope and the scope replaces the positional values it has with the stars coordinates - effectively the real ones. You are now matched.

You might find in the manual the advice not to use the feature more then 4 or 5 times during a session. Not sure why but I presume that something is introduced that eventually upsets the data. It is also 100% reliant on you actually centering the star that is on the handset. Wonder if this why it is not more obvious - someone will center the wrong star.

As you have found it is not made apparent but is useful, especially when the scope goes to an object and they are never quite central.

Meade, Skywatcher ans Celestron all have the feature but it information is never in one useful area or section.

[Steve Ward]

" As Steve says it is in there but as a rule never generally made apparent."   ......    " Meade, Skywatcher ans Celestron all have the feature but it information is never in one useful area or section."

All seems pretty apparent and 'in one useful area' to me ... ?

[ehorvath]

By golly that's right, I just looked again.....I totally missed that and only seen the Press Utility>PAE Correction>Enter.  LOL  I think my over excitement of having this GoTo mount clouded my eyesight!  LOL

[johnpd]

You might want to take a good look at the alignment star selection recommendations in the manual. The hand controller does not give you the optimum alignment stars. If you use the first stars that it gives you, pointing can be off.  The HC will give you the brightest stars first (unless you have changed the Alignment Star Sort to "Alphabet"). It can be a little time consuming to figure out the best pairs manually so I wrote an Excel spreadsheet to generate the best alignment star pairs according to the manual's recommendations and it comes up with much different star pairs than what the hand controller gives you and I get better pointing. One astronomer has incorporated my methods into a piece of software he wrote if you are interested in seeing what the differences are. It is called Tonight Sky: http://njstargazer.org/prog/prog.asp

JohnD