Rate of mount tracking for EQ5 motor drive

[SteveBz]

Hi Guys,

I've written a piece of software to drive my EQ5 dual motor drive using an Arduino project from Hackaday (see here:  https://hackaday.io/project/4386-arduino-st4-telescope-control)

And I've just seen that the reverse and forward tracking don't seem to track at the same rate.  Is that right or is it just the manuals not being clear.  I have the x.5, x2 and x16 SkyWatcher handset with an ST4 port.  I had imagined that the movement was against the Celestial Sphere, so forwards x2 = plus 1 against the Celestial Sphere and backwards is in reverse (ie minus 1) but the manual seems to say no movement.  Ok, now I've written that, it seems right.

Forward at x16 then is +15 against the Celestial Sphere but what is backwards?

And what is x.5?

Thanks very much.

Steve.

 

[SteveBz]

So as an update to this. It seems that against the celestial sphere, the rates in ra are:

x2: +/- 1 rate of rotation (ie X2 or still)

x16: +/- 15 rate of rotation (ie x16 positive or x14 negative).

That implies that dec works in a similar way (+/- n rather than x n+1).

Either way the labelling is wrong.