THE SYNSCAN MYSTERY

[DAVE AMENDALL]

I now have Synscan set up with polar alignment as accurate as possible. When finding dozens of objects they always appear on the cross hairs of my finder and track perfectly  even after a one star alignment. However there is one exception which is Alberio which always appears on the edge of the finder field which puts it approx half a degree out. Anyone had a similar experience. Any thoughts would be welcome. I have a permanent  pier mounted EQ6 which always returns with accuracy to the home position when asked.......................Dave

[alanjgreen]

If you get the coordinates of Alberio from the handset and verify them against the coordinates found on the internet, you can see if you have found a bug in the synscan object database.

When I was testing Starsense in the early days, there were several bugs in coordinates where someone had entered "+" when it actually should have been "-" or vice versa  

If other stars are on target then a database defect seems likely.

[DAVE AMENDALL]

Thanks, good thinking ,I will check that out

[Cosmic Geoff]

If we're including Celestron's Starsense in the discussion, I nave noted that while its performance is generally good ( typically to within 10' of arc), its performance on finding target-of-the month, Mars, is awful, being so bad that I have to resort to the red dot or the optical finder.  Fortunately Mars is not hard to find or identify ?.  There also seems to be some offset between objects located via the internal databases, and objects located by punching in the RA and Dec (less accurate) which I have never got around to systematically investigating.

[alanjgreen]

15 hours ago, Cosmic Geoff said:

If we're including Celestron's Starsense in the discussion, I nave noted that while its performance is generally good ( typically to within 10' of arc), its performance on finding target-of-the month, Mars, is awful, being so bad that I have to resort to the red dot or the optical finder.  Fortunately Mars is not hard to find or identify ?.  There also seems to be some offset between objects located via the internal databases, and objects located by punching in the RA and Dec (less accurate) which I have never got around to systematically investigating.

Geoff,

Celestron have known about the Mars bug for about 2 years, I don't know why they have not fixed it yet?

Maybe they have fixed it and you need to update your firmware, let me check the bug fix logs...

Ok, I checked...

I raised the bug via TeamCelestron on May 21,2016 (over 2 years ago) and its still not fixed

Here is the latest post from Celestron on this thread (via TeamCelestron website). There seems to be "dates" when the goto is not too bad and dates when the goto is way off resulting in some "bug denial" but then seem to have finally accepted a code fix is needed.

Maybe in another two years it will be working

Alan