Skywatcher 2012-2032 home position polar align (iOS)

[ecuador]

I suspect some of you with iPhones/iPads & equatorial mounts will be aware of the app Polar Scope Align. It has supported the Skywatcher 2012-2032 polar scope since it came out a few years ago and as it was quickly made clear it was never installed "upright" (unlike the iOptron, Tak, AstroPhysics etc polar scopes), users had to rotate the RA to make it upright (or at least have one of the 4 cardinal points pointing the top). So I had added a function (called "set zero position") where you give the app the RA on your hand controller the moment you had the reticle upright, and the next time the app would tell you what RA to rotate to with your hand controller to repeat that orientation. It makes some assumptions, that your date/time/location is set correctly on the controller, and you have done a rough star alignment before, so I called it an "advanced" feature, and a user recently asked me whether I could instead let users polar align with their mount at the "home" position, i.e. with the counterweight shaft pointing to the ground and the polar scope at the random angle it was installed in. Well, v5.5 has just come out with that function, you can see below the regular polar alignment screen as well as the rotated screen:

 

There's a couple of methods for calculating the rotation in the app help when pressing that (i) button, so setting it up once in the app should be enough as long as your mount is reasonably level from then on.

Unlike the "set zero position" function, I could not add the rotated view to the free version, as it relied on one of the pro version tool - apologies for that.

Anyway, I add so many things to the app every time (not to blow my own horn, but the changes list is rather extensive) and users often don't realise they are there, so I thought this tidbit might be helpful to many Skywatcher users.

Edited December 9, 2020 by ecuador