Alignment - sods law !

[malc-c]

Last night seemed fairly good for summer observing, with the sky fairly transparant, if not slightly turbulent due to it still being 21c at 11:45pm !  I rolled the observatory roof back, powered up the mount and PC and chose M13 as my target.  Scope slewed away, and after a few seconds I noticed the odd "tick, tick" sound.  Anyway thought nothing of it and once guiding was calibrated took my first test sub.  The result was dissapointing as M13 wasn't there !  Tried a few other objects and they too were off target.  I gave up and went to bed.

This morning i removed the covers on the mount to find one of the belts was slack, just enough to allow it to slip the odd tooth.  No problem, re-tension and tighten up the allen bolts.  Quick check using the sun.... and it was still off.  OK lets park the scope, clear the sync data from EQmod and go again..... still off.  No problem just position the scope using the direction keys and enter a new synk point once the sun was dead centre.  Having done that I re-parked the scope and then repeated the goto command... still out !

Checked all settings in Eqmod, and Cdc, all seemed OK and untouched since the last session.  Downloaded C2A software and set that up, same thing, so it's not the planetaruim software.  Updated EQMod and still go the same issue, and regardless of making corrections and then syncing it still positioned the scope in the wrong position, which was a good centimeter off target on the starsharp sun finder screen.

OK so lets go back to basics, let the software position the scope where it thinks the sun should be and then manaually release the clutches and move the scope until the sun was centred... then hit the sync button.   Now this worked, and repeated parks and slews to the sun resulted in a spot on goto, with the sun centred in the field of the image.  The annoying part of this is that I had to delete the sync table, which I had built up over the year, which before this issue, resulted in perfect goto's every time.

After all this fuffing around the sun looks fairl quiet in terms of spots, oh well !!

[Thalestris24]

Hiya

Astrotortilla is very useful - no need to build sync tables! Only for night-time use though.

Louise