An exercise in frustration

[JamesF]

I've just spent the last three hours trying to polar align my HEQ5 using EQAlign. Unfortunately I've not even got as far as adjusting the mount

First it recognised the camera, but wouldn't talk to it, so I had to reconfigure it to use the same camera in ASCOM mode. Not such a big deal. I got the first star sorted for the camera angle, which it measured happily enough and then selected a star in the west for az alignment. I wouldn't really have said the area it gave me to choose from was really in the west at all, but my location was correct so I went with the flow and picked a star. The instructions suggest it should automatically go to that star. It didn't. I had to do that manually. Alignment error seemed to be calculated without a problem, but then the fun really started.

When I used the arrow keys in the control pad section to move the star to the starting point for adjustment, it seemed like there was no way to stop the movement. If I pressed, say, the up arrow, the star would start moving in one direction. But I couldn't stop it. I could press the arrow for the other direction and get it to move that way, but I couldn't stop it moving. There's a red "X" in the middle of the buttons that I assumed might do that job, but it didn't actually appear to do anything at all.

After wasting a lot of time I decided that perhaps I could use the buttons in EQASCOM instead. I stopped EQAlign, took the mount back to the home position using EQASCOM and restarted EQAlign. Only this time I didn't get as far as correcting the alignment because it couldn't work out the camera angle at all. It initially calculated a figure about twenty degrees more than the first time around and it completely failed to settle, increasing the angle by about 0.1 degrees every few seconds.

By this time the Moon had started to brighten the sky and I was running out of stars I could see, so I decided to call it a night.

Oh, and it crashed. Lots. I had to kill it numerous times from the task manager.

I think I'm going to find another way to do it.

James

[dephelis]

Ouch!

I had the same problem with using the buttons, which resulted in me just using the EQASCOM controls via Loukas instead.

Didn't experience the other problems you had though.

I have to say that I find EQAlign to be bit of a chore and have been thinking of trying align master out.

[jetstream]

I give you credit for your patience and in the end you will resolve the issue.I saw one of your images-the ring-excellent,so all the work is paying off.Imaging interests me,as does GOTO mounts & when my knowledge level rises(I hope!) I may give it a try,for now we'll just watch & listen-posts like this are great,as they give insight into the "sport".Hopefully the fix for the HEQ5 is a quick one....

[Big Jim Slade]

Used to use EQAlign.

But I have seen the light and now use AstroTortilla's polar align routine. Time wise it's a bit quicker, and I like the fact that it tells you how far off you are in degrees/minutes/seconds. That allows you to keep tweaking or stop when you're within a few minutes, assuming you're guiding.

To be fair, I haven't done any detailed tests - I've got a sneaking suspicion that repeated solves will produce somewhat random results within a range. But my stars are nice and round, and I guess that's what counts!

[swag72]

I use PEMPro for polar alignment. It's a tad on the expensive side, but you can get a free 40 day trial to see if you think it's worth it. It is easy to do. Basically it does it all for you!!! I love it! it slews the mount where it wants to go, it will sort out your image scale and how your scope is aligned to NSEW and then you adjust the alt / az bolts as it tells you.

Give it a go - You've nothing to lose on a free trial! I bet you'll never use anything else after you tried it!!

[cfpendock]

I sympathise, James. I am not quite sure why, but software problems seem to waste so many hours when the sky is good. And it is very annoying that the good skies are not so often. On Thursday night I wasted three hours because for some reason my imaging camera refused to be recognised - and all the time I was guiding superbly. What a waste. After endless reboots and reconnects I gave up as the clouds approached. Of course the next day everything worked perfectly (in daylight), and the frustrating thing is that I haven't a clue what was going on. I've tried to replicate the problem without "success". On the other hand we haven't had any clear skies since.....

Chris

[Steve Ward]

Have you tried this way of drift-aligning with the camera ... ?

Works a treat and very simple , no more squinting into an illuminated EP for ages .

http://www.cloudynights.com/item.php?item_id=2838

[estwing]

I can't do stuff like this fiddling about...i'd end up going mad!

[JamesF]

Have you tried this way of drift-aligning with the camera ... ?

Works a treat and very simple , no more squinting into an illuminated EP for ages .

http://www.cloudynig...hp?item_id=2838

I have, and may well give it another go if I can't find anything better. I gave up on it last time because I couldn't convince myself that I could reliably work out which way to move the mount for any particular deviation, so effectively the first step for each axis became a test to see whether moving the mount one way increased or decreased the error. That makes it quite a slow process

My intention in trying EQAlign was to speed it up a fair bit.

James

[Russe]

Bless, James. I've done similar things and was amazed about my patience. That's but very much linked inversely to the local temperature...

Anyway, I haven't tried AstroTortilla in the field yet, but it's downloaded.

I use Alignmaster - in 10 min I've aligned 3x. This gets me guiding without problems.

[JamesF]

Well, I'm having a bit of a sense of humour failure now

Clear night this evening, so I was out at the crack of twilight and ran through a three-star alignment with the handset on Arcturus, Altair and Dubhe. Mostly because not much else was visible (Vega, but I didn't feel like breaking my neck to check it in the eyepiece). i switched to the camera and used Vega to get focus with the Bahtinov mask. Then parked the scope, powered off, unplugged the handset and plugged in the EQDIR controller. Unparked the scope in EQASCOM, fired up CdC and told it to move the mount to M13, it being an easy target to recognise. But it wasn't in the field of view when the mount stopped moving. Not even in the field of view of the finderguider (which is well-aligned with the scope) No idea why that would be, but clearly it's going to cause some trouble later.

Anyhow, having installed it earlier in the day I thought I'd give AstroTortilla a go. Configured the mount and camera, but as soon as I tried to do a polar align and asked it to find the error I just got a message "There has been an error". Nice. About as useful as a chocolate fireguard. The chocolate fireguard wins however, because I could at least use it to bludgeon the author of such an utterly useless error message. I checked the mount and camera were contactable in AA5, then retried AT, but still got the same error. No progress to be made there then.

Before restorting to another go at the DARV method I thought I'd give EQAlign one more go. Amazingly it actually seemed to work this time around, though the adjustment it suggested seemed considerably more than the handset had claimed were the errors in alt and az when I did the initial alignment. I thought I'd move it some of the way and have another go anyhow. Foolishly however I'd forgotten to account for the stiffness of the alt axis on the mount and the target star jumped off the edge of the field of view never to be seen again and I had to give up.

By this time the mount was badly misaligned, so I went back to alignment with the polar scope and attempted another three-star alignment, but clearly something is wrong because I couldn't even find the target stars in the guide camera field of view. Unfortunately I don't have an additional finder on the scope, just the finder-guider, so I decided I had no choice but to swap a finder back on, realign it and then sort out alignment sufficiently to have another go at the DARV method.

That was when the clouds rolled in despite the forecast for clear sky until the morning

So, tomorrow I go back to basics and check everything from the ground up. Then perhaps I can look at why CdC can't find targets for me.

James

[Demonperformer]

AT has some serious problems in the polar alignment region. Check out the bottom of my post http://stargazerslou...riously-screwy/ where I tried three back-to-back AZ checks without moving anything and got three totally different and increasing errors (from 12' through 53' to 20 DEGREES+!). Almost as much use as the following night when all AT kept saying to me was:

2013-08-21 02:32:58,969 - astrotortilla - INFO - 75 [main] bash 1768 child_info_fork::abort: C:\cygwin\bin\cygncursesw-10.dll: Loaded to different address: parent(0x2F0000) != child(0x3B0000)

2013-08-21 02:32:59,265 - astrotortilla - INFO - /etc/profile: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable

and refusing to solve anything under any circumstances. No idea what those messages mean (not sure anyone would). So have lost all patience with AT and have now downloaded alignmaster and hope I get a night when I can try it before the 30 days runs out.

This all constitutes what I believe is called "fun"!

[Russe]

Oh no! I feel for you!! I was about to go out as well, but since I don't have the right T thread adaptor yet, I thought lets leave the SPC where it is.

Here's what I do for alignment:

1. Visual polar scope adjustment as per polar finder's Polaris position

2. Visual 2x alignmaster

3. Screw in the QHY5 into my finder scope and one more alignmaster run

4. 3x sync stars via EQMOD around my target area

5. Slew to target

6. Put camera in and check framing

7. Fire up PHD

8. Hey ho silver... Off off and away

Where in this routine would AT come into?

[cgarry]

Clear night this evening, so I was out at the crack of twilight and ran through a three-star alignment with the handset on Arcturus, Altair and Dubhe. Mostly because not much else was visible (Vega, but I didn't feel like breaking my neck to check it in the eyepiece). i switched to the camera and used Vega to get focus with the Bahtinov mask. Then parked the scope, powered off, unplugged the handset and plugged in the EQDIR controller. Unparked the scope in EQASCOM, fired up CdC and told it to move the mount to M13, it being an easy target to recognise. But it wasn't in the field of view when the mount stopped moving. Not even in the field of view of the finderguider (which is well-aligned with the scope) No idea why that would be, but clearly it's going to cause some trouble later.

Hi James,

I have not used EQASCOM for a while, but I do not understand why you did a three-star alignment with the handset. As I understand it the handset has no role to play with EQASCOM.

Chris

[JamesF]

I have not used EQASCOM for a while, but I do not understand why you did a three-star alignment with the handset. As I understand it the handset has no role to play with EQASCOM.

Mostly to check that the mount wasn't too far out before I started fiddling with things (and to confirm what the alignment error figures actually were).

James

[swag72]

Have you tried the PEMPro free trial James?

[JamesF]

Have you tried the PEMPro free trial James?

Not yet. Ran out of clear sky last night for anything further

James

[JamesF]

Oh no! I feel for you!! I was about to go out as well, but since I don't have the right T thread adaptor yet, I thought lets leave the SPC where it is.

Here's what I do for alignment:

1. Visual polar scope adjustment as per polar finder's Polaris position

2. Visual 2x alignmaster

3. Screw in the QHY5 into my finder scope and one more alignmaster run

4. 3x sync stars via EQMOD around my target area

5. Slew to target

6. Put camera in and check framing

7. Fire up PHD

8. Hey ho silver... Off off and away

Where in this routine would AT come into?

Probably around steps 2 to 3.

James

[ollypenrice]

And this is why I get called a luddite etc because I keep the electronics to an absolute minimum. Why? Because they do this all the time. At the moment it's the Tak mounts not talking to one of the PCs. Boring! What will it be next? Filterwheel not recognized? Boring. A routine Windows update stopped my cameras from being recognized. Boring!

Why burden yourself with all this PC faffing when all you have to do to get a decent polar alignment is use the polarscope? I can usually throw up an EQ6, use the polarscope, and image at a metre in 15 min subs straight from there. A very quick drift align will tune out most of the residual error should that prove necessary. 10 minutes would be an exaggeration. Most of the people who come here with their own mounts use polarscopes and then just get on with it. I think they may have a point.

Olly

[JamesF]

If I could resolve the issue of why CdC can't even get a target in the field of view of the finder-guider when the handset can get it in the middle of the main scope's field of view then it might be tempting to do as you suggest Olly. I don't understand that one at the moment. I've checked that everything has the date and time set the same and that they all have the same settings for longitude and latitude. I must surely have something configured wrongly, but I can't work out what it is for the moment.

James

[cgarry]

If I could resolve the issue of why CdC can't even get a target in the field of view of the finder-guider when the handset can get it in the middle of the main scope's field of view then it might be tempting to do as you suggest Olly. I don't understand that one at the moment. I've checked that everything has the date and time set the same and that they all have the same settings for longitude and latitude. I must surely have something configured wrongly, but I can't work out what it is for the moment.

James

If you haven't done an alignment equivalent in EQASCOM then I wouldn't expect particularly accurate gotos unless you have perfect polar alignment, no cone error and a perfect home position to start with. I have always found EQASCOM to be far easier to work with than the handset.

Chris

[Russe]

That's why I use a laptop for AP that never gets Windows updates...

I only selectively update drivers

[JamesF]

If you haven't done an alignment equivalent in EQASCOM then I wouldn't expect particularly accurate gotos unless you have perfect polar alignment, no cone error and a perfect home position to start with. I have always found EQASCOM to be far easier to work with than the handset.

Well, herein lies another source of confusion for me as regards EQAlign. Given that alignment in EQASCOM has been done, if I did the correction for alt in EQAlign (select a suitable star, go to it, measure the drift and change the alt axis to move the star to the right place) doesn't that then break EQASCOM's alignment model, meaning that when you select a star for az alignment in EQAlign, the mount won't go to the right place when you tell it to?

James

[chrisshillito]

If you do goto alignmenr in EQASCOM prior to polar alignment adjustment then, yes, you will have ruined the goto alignment.

I would say that polar alignment should always be performed prior to goto alignment amd that no pointing model should be active when using these semi automatic pc based polar alignment utilities.

Chris.

[JamesF]

Well, I am pleased to announce that after some more fighting with stuff this evening (including accidentally kicking a tripod leg halfway through), I appear to have made progress.

Earlier today I levelled the tripod (I know this is not necessary, but...), checked the polar scope alignment and set the mount manually in the "home" position. Then this evening I did a polar alignment using the polar scope, did a three-star alignment using the handset to check the alignment error wasn't too bad, aligned an optical finder and then reconnected using EQASCOM. I used CdC to set four alignment points up in EQASCOM and have had no trouble with CdC since.

What I have failed at is getting guiding to work with AA5. It keeps losing the guide star. I wasted a fair bit of time there. PHD seems to be doing ok now I've switched it using it. I probably need to read up more on guiding in AA5, particularly relating to use of darks as I think part of the problem was that occasionally it decided it preferred a hot pixel or some noise to the guide star.

For the time being I think I'm going to leave improving the polar alignment itself. Probably until I get the mount on a pier.

James