Auto(mobile) Polar Alignment

[tomato]

Just got a new motor, a Volvo (I must be getting old) and I discovered one of the drive modes is “Polestar Engineered”. It turns out it is a drive mode engineered between Volvo and Polestar, an electric car manufacturer whom I had never heard of.

I’m gutted, for a while I thought the car was going to auto polar align the mount when I travelled to a dark site.☺️

[Robindonne]

If you empty the cooling fluid tank and turn up the heating you might get a perfectly 55 degrees

[michael8554]

Polestar used to be the Racing Dept. of Volvo, like Mercedes and AMG, but now it's their EV brand.

The Polestar 2 is one of the few EVs that compares to a Tesla.

And Tesla are years ahead of most other EV makers.

Have you seen the Audi, Mercedes etc TV ads, all "concept car, not available to buy ......"

Michael

 

[wimvb]

On 25/03/2021 at 22:22, tomato said:

I’m gutted, for a while I thought the car was going to auto polar align the mount when I travelled to a dark site.☺️

Demand your money back. 

[david_taurus83]

Curious, has anyone ever tried to rig a mount with a few stepper motors to remote polar align?

[StevieDvd]

I was pondering on this the other day.

My design head was thinking of a 2 stepper motor system which adjusted a base until it was level and the axis was polar aligned. The software side was using platesolving to take say 4 pictures (N, S, E & W) to calculate the current axis versus the correct one.

My practical head said it would cost too much and the variations in scope and locations would make it a non-starter.

My actual head said only a fool with 3 heads would try selling that on Dragon's Den.

[wimvb]

1 hour ago, david_taurus83 said:

Curious, has anyone ever tried to rig a mount with a few stepper motors to remote polar align?

Once you have good PA, you don't want to move the mount anymore, and you definitely don't want anything else to move the mount either. Ie, you want to bolt it down. Question is, how would you do that remotely? Leave it unbolted and you have a wobbly mount.

But if you want to do it, you can just put an eq mount on top of an alt-az mount.

Edited March 29, 2021 by wimvb