Hi there!
I'm a bit of a beginner, please forgive me if I'm not explaining things correctly, I can explain further if needed.
I bought a Sky-watcher HEQ5 mount with Synscan (firmware version 04.37.03), with the plan of using it as part of an art/educational exhibition event, so what I'm doing may sound completely nonsensical, but please bear with me knowing this is not for traditional viewing or photography purposes: it's going to be used to illustrate the motion of the earth in relation to the galaxy, so it will run 24-hours a day with a big wooden arrow on it instead of a telescope (it's very lightweight and balanced, of course, and I checked that it won't hit the tripod), running even when the galactic center is below the horizon and the sun it out. It will always be "pointing" to the center. I hope that makes sense. Strange, I know.
I have been doing some tests indoors before I use it in this project but I'm running into some issues. The coordinates I want to follow are RA 17h 45m 40s / DEC −29° 00′ 28″, the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. It doesn't appear to exist in any of the object databases in the Synscan (as far as I can tell, from looking in the Simbad database, unless I am wrong?) I'm at 59.9º N, meaning the location is most often below the horizon, so the mount will not slew to it 90% of the time when using the 'user defined objects.'
For the sake of my tests, what I have tried to do is to manually slew to the coordinates while the sidereal tracking in on, in the hopes that it will simply follow the motion.
However, I am finding a problem: it will start it at the exact coordinates I slew it to (RA 17h 45m 40s / DEC −29° 00′ 28″), but immediately it starts to slowly drift away in the DEC, one arcsecond at a time. For example, now at 12 hours of running, the DEC is at -28º 38' 16" (the RA remains accurate.)
Tonight I am going to get up at 5am to do a 'user defined object' test, when the location is above the horizon, to see what happens. But for the sake of convenience, though, I would sure like to have the manual slew/sidereal tracking option work as well.
When setting it up, I do just a one-star alignment, but since I am still indoors, I can't visually confirm it's correctness. (But shouldn't that technically not matter? In that the point of the sidereal tracking is to follow coordinates exactly?)
Anyone have an idea as to what's going on here?
Thanks for your time, everyone!