Dome Slaving

[Ursa Jaffa]

Hi,

I'm after some advice on dome slaving.  I have a Pulsar 2.2 metre with the dome rotation kit (and two equipment bays) arriving at the end of November and I'd like to slave it to the hand controller rather than buy Maxim DL, SGP etc.

Is this possible?  My mount is a CGX-L with the standard handset.  I use SharpCap Pro to capture images and I am not looking to change my setup drastically nor spend anymore money at this point given what the observatory has cost me.

Thanks in advance!

Adam

[skybadger]

Does sharp cap control the scope through ascom ? Replace that driver with POTH and chain the original driver and dome driver from POTH to get to your desired result.

[Ursa Jaffa]

No I don't think it has the ability to control the scope ?  unless I've missed something.  Don't want to stop using it as I've only recently got it set up the way I want for taking decent pictures!

[pmlogg]

I think that the slaving would have to be via a computer.  If you are in the dome and not using a computer then aligning the dome by the buttons on the rotation drive won't be much of an effort. 

Celestron has a downloadable computer control programme CPWI that connects via the handset and there appear to be ASCOM drivers for that.  ASCOM lists Celestron drivers and Pulsar says "The supplied Pulsar Observatories software package allows full control of the observatory from a computer, and includes  an ASCOM driver for use with third party software, i.e. Maxim DL, to allow full synchronisation with your telescope."  I presume they mean 'e.g.' rather than "i.e." so that you wouldn't have to have MaximDL.  If so then POTH in conjunction with CPWI and the ASCOM drivers should allow slaving of Dome to Mount.  POTH is part of the ASCOM platform.

I don't use SharpCap but I can't see that it has a GoTo feature anyway; the guiding feature wouldn't in itself need slaving.  I would imagine that you could simultaneously use SharpCap as now.    Certainly worth a try once you have the dome up and running.

[steppenwolf]

You would certainly need to use an ASCOM driver for your mount and control your mount via a computer but you don't need anything more than a planetarium program like the free Cartes du Ciel and POTH. This is essentially what I use to control my Pulsar dome and it works faultlessly.

[skybadger]

Yeah - wot he said. 

Tell us more about what controls your scope  - do you have ascom installed ?