Full EQStar Pro Review

[Trippelforge]

21 hours ago, Celerondon said:

It is good to hear from powerlord that the EQStar controllers are less finicky about the hibernate/home/park commands.  My controller already has the latest firmware update so I will check to see how critical hibernation is with my current software and usage combination.  

I still haven't grasped that. So far I have aligned via the polar scope, then multi star alignment with the software. I hit the target I want and it moves to it, I just don't understand what parking does. 

[powerlord]

With the newer board and firmware - it's doens't do much really. It's just that when you switch stuff on, it needs to know where it is - and it used to assume it was in some weird rotated nonsensible angle making alignment and gotos just not work right it seemed to me. Now it just does what you expect - power it all up in home position (pointing at polaris), and do yer alignment (or in my case, PA and plate solve), and it just works fine.

Ideally, set it back to home position at the end - which is all that 'hibernate' does. But to be honest I've not found it makes any difference vs just powering it off - just always power it on when its in home position.

Also if you are new to goto, remember that once you've done a rough 3 star alignment, if you are going to one bit of the sky - goto there and ensure you do use syncscan to adjust it till it is centred and sync. the sync updates eqstar with a new point inits DB of where it is - it means that then, gotos to other local objects will be far more precise. It's also worth bearing that in mind when choosing the 3 stars to do you iinitial alignment on - i.e. try to choose one that is near what you want to goto later.

 

[Trippelforge]

2 hours ago, powerlord said:

With the newer board and firmware - it's doens't do much really. It's just that when you switch stuff on, it needs to know where it is - and it used to assume it was in some weird rotated nonsensible angle making alignment and gotos just not work right it seemed to me. Now it just does what you expect - power it all up in home position (pointing at polaris), and do yer alignment (or in my case, PA and plate solve), and it just works fine.

Ideally, set it back to home position at the end - which is all that 'hibernate' does. But to be honest I've not found it makes any difference vs just powering it off - just always power it on when its in home position.

Also if you are new to goto, remember that once you've done a rough 3 star alignment, if you are going to one bit of the sky - goto there and ensure you do use syncscan to adjust it till it is centred and sync. the sync updates eqstar with a new point inits DB of where it is - it means that then, gotos to other local objects will be far more precise. It's also worth bearing that in mind when choosing the 3 stars to do you iinitial alignment on - i.e. try to choose one that is near what you want to goto later.

 

 

Thanks for the tips. I was just randomly picking up anything easy to see regardless of where it was.