brancusi

I think the content and people on the forum make it what it is - great - however I find it much, much slower than other sites with pages often taking 20 seconds or more to load. This is pretty regular and seems unique to this forum compared to others I use. Whether I'm using a PC, Mac, Safari, Chrome makes no difference and my internet connection is generally around 50Mbps so it's not a local issue. Does anyone else find this? Roger

The bar for astrophotography hasn't so much been raised, as catapulted to an altogether more elevated place - approximately 1,600 light years away. Inspirational work.

Fantastic help - thanks all, and the clouds have even parted for long enough for me to test it all now works. Getting the home position roughly right was indeed the key to it.

My question is probably best expressed as - how on earth do I sync the telescope (AZ-EQ6 via EQMOD) through Stellarium on a star near the pole? I'm trying to establish a workflow where I use plate solving via AstroTortilla to sync the scope setup to the sky before an imaging session, as such the scope is accurately polar aligned, but otherwise UN-ALIGNED when I start. I thought I would be able to do this; 1) Point telescope randomly at the sky 2) Take a 10 sec exposure 3) Plate solve to find central RA/DEC 4) Sync the scope to this position It seems that steps 1 through 3 are fine - I did this last night and could plate solve every image I took - but NONE of them would sync. I was getting error messages about the sync being ignored because the delta in position was too large (apologies I didn't write down the exact message) and so I could never get the ASCOM Ra/Dec to match the solved image :-( In desperation I put the scope roughly in weights down pointing north and then tried to use Stellarium Scope to sync on Polaris to at least narrow the error so that subsequent plate solves would work - but every time I used sync, the command was simply ignored unless I tried to sync on a star that was a long way from the pole - it felt that the software was blocking me without telling me what was going wrong. Is my plan to do this without an initial one star alignment flawed? Is there really no way to force EQASCOM to think the scope is at a specific Ra/Dec? It could be I was just too cold last night to think clearly but it felt that I was so near and yet so far from getting it all to work ... Help appreciated! Thanks, Roger