EQ3 Pro GOTO - Home Position for Startup

[BargeGazer]

Prior to starting the 3 star location sequence on the GOTO mount, I assume the telescope has to be in the home Position for easiest and best results (having previously polar aligned the mount).

Am I right that the "home" position on this mount is with the weight bar pointing vertically down the North leg of the mount and the telescope pointing North to Polaris. I have seen others say the scope should be horizontal.

Help please, which is it?

Many thanks

(First post so I hope I have protocol right)

[badgers]

Counterweight shaft aligned with the North leg is what I do on the HEQ5 goto, I've never had issues with goto accuracy.

[Photosbykev]

Counterweights down the north leg and scope towards Polaris. Power down and then on again when you have it correctly positioned. To use the polar scope you do need the scope horizontal so that there is a hole for the polar scope to view through but home position is as you've described

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[BargeGazer]

Thanks both of you. Now I can do a bit of assisted viewing. Have already been amazed by the little telescope with its easy and good manual viewing.

[brantuk]

For visual only I tend to cheat a bit with alignment. I level the mount and get the N leg pointing north as best I can and tweak the polar alignment with alt/az bolts and polar scope. I allways start with the weights bar pointing down on the same side.

Then I depart from normal alignment by just telling the scope to goto some object that I can see high in the sky. It just goes anywhere cos I've not registered a start position.

Then - wherever it stops I just undo the clutches and point it at the chosen object so the electronics "think" they've gone there. If I can get an approximate position then center up using the handset it confirms the position to the electronics.

After that it should go wherever you tell it - just use the PEA a few times if it's off target. It seems to work for me - if it doesn't I just do a two star align using the original object as the start position - it'll allways "goto" back there

(This won't be accurate enough for imaging however)

[Tinker1947]

I haven't used GoTo but a couple of night back waiting for it to get dark i thought i will get it on a 3 star align so scope pointing at Polaris went through the 3 stars each star found in a wide FOV then centered in a 5mm, it got to the end and bleep it had failed, not sure why but i chose Capella as a Goto object, it promptly slewed and place it in the FOV, so i don't know,,at the moment the scope it imagine (10 X 30 Seconds) M15, found with me Telrad and that's at 23:15 BST....

[Leo.A]

Thanks for the tip Brantuk!

I've pondered the validity of this method myself with the exception of always starting from the home position but my son keeps telling me it won't work and he seems to read and remember more than I do.

Smart alec teenagers....

Next time when the sky clears (in about 15 years I believe) I'm going to do exactly that!

[earth titan]

Switch mount off. Put mount in normal rough home position then rotate RA until counterweight shaft is horizontal, setting this as 0 on the RA setting circle. Then return mount to 'home' position but make sure RA circle now points to 6 or 18, depending on which way you went, then lock clutch.

Now rotate DEC until dovetail slot is horizontal. Set the DEC circle to 0 then rotate round to 90 and lock clutch. This is home.

I use a spirit level and it takes 2 minutes.

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