Sabalias

Thanks Neil. I'll look at the PAE option. It probably got cleared when I did the factory reset.... Stu

Thanks Wookie. Unfortunately I don't have an Android phone and the app doesn't appear to exist on the Apple App Store. I have got PS Align Pro which seems to have all the necessary information though. Stu

I’ve experimented again over the last 30 mins and all seems to be working correctly. There must have been some user error last night or a temporary glitch in the mount. Anyway, thanks for the advice.

Yep, all correct for where I am. Stu

Thanks Peter. I have an iPhone and use PS Align Pro which, I assume, is similar?

Hi Malc, Thanks for taking the time to comment. That was my first thought so I checked it and rechecked it every time (W x°xx'; N y°yy'; Time = mm/dd/yyy; Timezone = +00.00; Time = local time; DST = 'yes'). Sadly (or perhaps not) everything was as it should be (unless the W should have been -x°xx'?). Stu

I hope someone can help me - I've looked back through the forums and found some mention of this phenomenon but I'm not sure that it was answered. Last night I wanted to check that my newly-purchased guide camera was guiding (first clear night in a while). I set up as accurately as I could: Mount was level Accurate polar alignment Scope balanced RA and Dec manually set to home using a level Synscan booted up Location, date, time, time zone and daylight-saving set (and triple-checked over the period) At this point I chose 1 star alignment as I all I wanted to do was a simple functionality check of the guide camera. Looking around the (still bright) sky I saw that the only option open to me was Arcturus, so I selected that on the Synscan handset. The motors started whirring away and the scope began to slew in the right direction. At this point it seemed to go very wrong; instead of slewing all the way to Arcturus, the motion stopped with the scope pointing at a point where the star would have been 4 or 5 hours earlier. I decided to try it all again (checking everything) and the same thing happened; however, this time I adjusted the scope to point at the star (using the arrow keys on the handset) but I was told that the alignment had failed (I did see something like this displayed “R.A offset xx degrees re-check location, date and time). I tried everything again – same problem so I factory reset the handset. I put all the data in fresh and tried to align again but the scope still stopped too early, pointing at where Arcturus would have been about 4 or 5 hours earlier. It was getting late and I had run out of things to try so I packed up and went indoors to do some googling etc. Once inside I decided to update the handset firmware and then experiment indoors. I set everything up as before and included parking the mount in the home position then restarting it. The scope still wound up pointing at the same wrong piece of sky. This time I slewed the mount around to point at Arcturus and it said ‘alignment successful’ which I found a bit confusing but there we go. I re-parked the mount and restarted it; went through all the setup rigmarole and this time the scope slewed correctly to Arcturus. On to my questions then: Has anyone got any idea why this might have happened in the first place? Last time I took the scope out it behaved beautifully. The only thing I did between then and last night was to connect the handset to my Astroberry to see if they would talk to each other (it’s possible I might have clicked on something I suppose). Is this normal behaviour after factory reset/firmware update, is my handset knackered or is this just one of those weird and wacky things that happens sometimes? Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read. Stu

Hi everyone, I've been a lurker for a while and then joined a few weeks ago. I got into astronomy back in the 90s but only for a couple of years (family and work took over); recently (with the kids grown up) I've been able to get back into it and have heen scraping together all the equipment I think I could benefit from having (not there yet 😂). I've already managed to pick up some really useful pointers from other people's questions on the forum so thanks! Stu