Exos 2 goto woes

[jnb]

I don't usually use goto on my mount. I bought a goto mount because it has a ST4 port and at some point I want to start guiding my photographs, but as it has goto I thought I try it.

The Bresser Exos 2 is fundamentally same as the EQ5 or LXD75 so I am guessing that the same points will apply to those mounts and the issues might not be unique to the Bresser.

Usually I just use the mount by polar aligning, navigating by hand to my target and then letting it track. The first point is that whenever I use the handset it insists on beeping with every button push and beeping repeatedly if I hold down any of the direction buttons. It does what I want, it just does it noisily. Is there any way to turn off those beeps? I can't find anything in the hand controller that offers a "quiet" mode.

The other issue I encountered was when trying the goto mode last night. I polar aligned as normal. Set the scope into its home position and asked it do do a two star align. It only offered Deneb and Altair as target stars but that's OK as both were visible. It slewed to Altair and was less than half a degree out. I centered Altair and said OK. Now it looked for Deneb and was within 10'. Excellent I thought, centered it and set about using it. Now I asked it to find M31. Nice easy target, pretty close to the zenith should be a doddle to find if the two star align was that easy. Off it goes heading up toward M31, but then veers off in some random direction and ends up about 20° off target. OK is there something up with the two star align that's stopping that? So I reset everything and try a three star align. Now it still offers me the choice of only Deneb and Altair, even though I want a three star align. I start on Altair, that's OK, move to Deneb, that's looking good, and for it's third star it offers Deneb and Altair again! OK well I'll see if it's any better because it certainly found them easily enough. First target I try is M57, away it goes and gets closer but still about 2° out. OK try M31 and again it's about 20° out.

Does anyone have any ideas what might be going wrong?

[ronin]

Friend had similar on a small Meade and it was simply power, it managed to get through just about everything then on the goto at fast slew it didn't have the current available and the mount sort of lost it. The power available I suspect was used up on the alignment action and the goto bit was just too much.

Not sure what your power source was however, but if the mount says it needs 1 amp then really 2.5 amp is more realistic and 5 amp should be enough in hand.

Would expect a "no beep" option in the menu somewhere, seems a little odd to have one. If it were me then by the fourth beep it would be a very dead handset. Not sure the origin of the controller, would be a Meade item I would say. Will check the assorted manuals I seem to have collected in pdf format.

[ronin]

Closest so far is the Meade LX75 based system.

TRY:

Setup - Utilities, then Enter to get the sub options.

Under this there is:

Timer, Alarm, Eyepiece Calc, Display Options, Brightness, Contrast then Beep.

I would guess this is the bit you want.

The assumption is however that the EXOS follows the LX75 type mount.

I cannot find a Beep on the LX55 ones which I would have thought more applicable, so it is a bit of a try it and see.

[jnb]

Friend had similar on a small Meade and it was simply power, it managed to get through just about everything then on the goto at fast slew it didn't have the current available and the mount sort of lost it. The power available I suspect was used up on the alignment action and the goto bit was just too much.

Not sure what your power source was however, but if the mount says it needs 1 amp then really 2.5 amp is more realistic and 5 amp should be enough in hand.

Would expect a "no beep" option in the menu somewhere, seems a little odd to have one. If it were me then by the fourth beep it would be a very dead handset. Not sure the origin of the controller, would be a Meade item I would say. Will check the assorted manuals I seem to have collected in pdf format.

Power supply is a 12V 15Ah golf cart battery. I've a voltmeter on that which gives some indication of battery health but I didn't turn that on last night. I have long planned on replacing the 15Ah with something heavier duty so I may do that sooner rather than later. Certainly it would account for why a slew from Deneb to M31 is about twice as far as Deneb to M57 so it might account for why the failure was so marked on M31 as being further it would get up to a higher slew speed.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[ronin]

It just matched what I had seen.

They said they had a problem, so on a visit I powered it up, set the data and said Align, it went to Star 1 and I said OK, it went to Star 2 and I said OK.

All looked fine, alignment Good/Successful.

When I asked it to slew to somewhere else it started out normally then struggled a bit and began waving around a little randomly and kind of drifted to pointing straight up.

Golf cart battery should be OK, they will have easily enough for the mount.

There is likely a Max Slew Rate option on the handset, usually intended to keep the noise down, but setting that to say 7 or 8 (assume there are 10 slew rates) should also reduce the peak drain from the battery. Might help also.

If the handset is still beeping then it would not matter to me as I would have jumped up and down on it several times long before the power supply even came into consideration.

[Saket]

On 2015-8-23 at 17:12, jnb said:

I don't usually use goto on my mount. I bought a goto mount because it has a ST4 port and at some point I want to start guiding my photographs, but as it has goto I thought I try it.

The Bresser Exos 2 is fundamentally same as the EQ5 or LXD75 so I am guessing that the same points will apply to those mounts and the issues might not be unique to the Bresser.

Usually I just use the mount by polar aligning, navigating by hand to my target and then letting it track. The first point is that whenever I use the handset it insists on beeping with every button push and beeping repeatedly if I hold down any of the direction buttons. It does what I want, it just does it noisily. Is there any way to turn off those beeps? I can't find anything in the hand controller that offers a "quiet" mode.

The other issue I encountered was when trying the goto mode last night. I polar aligned as normal. Set the scope into its home position and asked it do do a two star align. It only offered Deneb and Altair as target stars but that's OK as both were visible. It slewed to Altair and was less than half a degree out. I centered Altair and said OK. Now it looked for Deneb and was within 10'. Excellent I thought, centered it and set about using it. Now I asked it to find M31. Nice easy target, pretty close to the zenith should be a doddle to find if the two star align was that easy. Off it goes heading up toward M31, but then veers off in some random direction and ends up about 20° off target. OK is there something up with the two star align that's stopping that? So I reset everything and try a three star align. Now it still offers me the choice of only Deneb and Altair, even though I want a three star align. I start on Altair, that's OK, move to Deneb, that's looking good, and for it's third star it offers Deneb and Altair again! OK well I'll see if it's any better because it certainly found them easily enough. First target I try is M57, away it goes and gets closer but still about 2° out. OK try M31 and again it's about 20° out.

Does anyone have any ideas what might be going wrong?

Hello,

I have a question regarding the EXOS 2 GoTo.

I wanted to know that the remote only guides it throughout the sky so one can take long exposure images

Or one has to connect it the a guide scope and laptop (the long way)

[Saket]

On 2015-8-23 at 18:20, ronin said:

It just matched what I had seen.

They said they had a problem, so on a visit I powered it up, set the data and said Align, it went to Star 1 and I said OK, it went to Star 2 and I said OK.

All looked fine, alignment Good/Successful.

When I asked it to slew to somewhere else it started out normally then struggled a bit and began waving around a little randomly and kind of drifted to pointing straight up.

Golf cart battery should be OK, they will have easily enough for the mount.

There is likely a Max Slew Rate option on the handset, usually intended to keep the noise down, but setting that to say 7 or 8 (assume there are 10 slew rates) should also reduce the peak drain from the battery. Might help also.

If the handset is still beeping then it would not matter to me as I would have jumped up and down on it several times long before the power supply even came into consideration.

Hello,

I have a question regarding the EXOS 2 GoTo.

I wanted to know that the remote only guides it throughout the sky so one can take long exposure images

Or one has to connect it the a guide scope and laptop (the long way)

[alacant]

On 16/6/2017 at 04:57, Saket said:

remote only guides it throughout the sky so one can take long exposure images

You can do up to 1 minute exposures.

On 16/6/2017 at 04:57, Saket said:

Or one has to connect it the a guide scope and laptop (the long way)

For anything longer, yes. It has a st4 port to connect to a guide camera. HTH.