Issue syncing EQ mount in Cartes du ciel with eqmod

[5haan_A]

Hi Guys,

 

Finally after some really cloudy weather we had a night tonight where the clouds were clear and I could take my new scope and set up outside and start getting to grips with imaging.

 

This isn't technically first light, but the times I had taken this scope out before was just to get my head round the various bits of software. So to give you an overview of what I'm using:

 

Skywatcher EQ 6r pro connected direct to laptop with EQMOD EQASCOM interface driving it using Cartes du ciel.  All of which was working fine till tonight. 

 

Here is the problem, after manually slewing the scope via the interface to a chosen star, lets say polaris, I go into my Cartes du ciel app and click sync and I get an error saying ra dec sync rejected. I'm not too sure why at all. My scope also thinks its near Meridian limits when manually slewing sometimes even though I know its pointing at or near polaris. 

 

After a little investigation I think a lot of it is because I don't park to a home position after I finish a session- perhaps. The day before I just disconnected the scope after I had finishing capturing some data. I take it this is not the the thing to do? That being said, what do I do now. How do I get my software to now know where it is properly and sync to stars correctly.

Thanks in advance,

 

Best

[upahill]

Going from memory here but I had a similar issue and it was down to the scopes position being so far off from where the software thought it was that it wouldn't allow a sync.

My method for getting around it was to reset everything, put the mount manually to the home position, then power off and restart EQMod. Do my first sync close to home position and then go from there. Was a pain but in fairness only happened when I hadn't parked properly the previous night.

Heres another thread that describes the process a little better perhaps -

 

[symmetal]

Polaris is the worst star in the sky to sync on with an EQ mount as it's so close to the celestial pole that with a small polar alignment error of less than 1 degree the scopes RA could be any random value when polaris is centred. Also it could easily hit a meridian limit if the dec tries to go through 90 degrees and a meridian flip is needed. Moving in RA to try and centre polaris may also try to drive past the meridian and cause a limit error. CdC could well refuse to sync when the Dec is close to 90 degrees as it would cause more problems than it solves.

Chose objects less than around 45 deg Dec to sync on for alignment purposes and you and CdC should be happy. 

Alan