Daylight savings time - ON or OFF?

[Carpo]

Help please, newbie here. I've a Meade 10" LX200, with an Autostar controller. I'm in France which, like UK, has daylight savings during winter. So when it calls for "Daylight Savings Time", do I have to put "NO" in the summer and "YES" in the winter? or do I leave it as "YES" and presume the scope will work things out based on the integral clock and date?

The reason I ask is I'm having trouble with my initial alignment and want to check all the possible issues.

Many thanks!

[scotty38]

I set mine to yes when it's on ie now and then off again when BST stops. It's a Sky-Watcher mount but the principle will be exactly the same.

 

Oh daylight savings is during the summer months not winter, maybe that's where you're getting mixed up?

Edited June 1, 2021 by scotty38

[Sabalias]

37 minutes ago, scotty38 said:

I set mine to yes when it's on ie now and then off again when BST stops. It's a Sky-Watcher mount but the principle will be exactly the same.

 

Oh daylight savings is during the summer months not winter, maybe that's where you're getting mixed up?

Scotty’s absolutely right; we are currently an hour difference from GMT so daylight savings is ‘on’ for us in the UK and, I believe that it’s ‘on’ for France too. 
 

Stu

Edited June 1, 2021 by Sabalias

[skyhog]

I have an obsy mounted 12 lx200gps and daylight saving is always on. It's always yes as it goes through its initialisation. This makes sense to me as it follows the system time on the pc I have in there which always follows local time. 

[scotty38]

19 minutes ago, skyhog said:

I have an obsy mounted 12 lx200gps and daylight saving is always on. It's always yes as it goes through its initialisation. This makes sense to me as it follows the system time on the pc I have in there which always follows local time. 

Just for clarity I assume what you are saying here is that you have it enabled on the PC (always on) such that the pc observes daylight savings for your local time. What that means is that for the given timezone an hour will be added/removed accordingly. If this setting is "OFF" then no changes will be made regardless. I understood that setting it to yes in the mount would always add an hour to the local time. Well that's how it seems to work on my mount anyway.....

Edited June 1, 2021 by scotty38

[skyhog]

No, the scope initialises via the handset first which as far as I'm aware I have set as on for daylight saving time. I then connect to the pc when I have slewed to the first star. My point was that the pc is always running with my local time which obviously makes sense. 

[Carpo]

Many thanks for the responses. That confirms how I've been operating. I'll have another go tonight. When I checked the date and time last night, both were out by quite a margin, (4 days, 6 hours) so I thought the CR2032 battery would be low. When I checked, it was still over 3v, so that one is a mystery. I changed it anyway so that will be one further step forward. 

I last used the scope at end of March and everything was fine on the alignment side. I'll try the two star alignment tonight, with Polaris and Vega. There's a problem when I use "Easy Align" since the first star, Arcturus, is hidden by trees.

[skyhog]

Just as a matter of interest is the scope taking its time stamp from GPS? 

[oscar_camilleri]

If the alignment is failing also check that the date is in the correct format. I have a celestron 8se and the date is in the American format on my mount as in mm/dd/yyyy.

[ollypenrice]

France and the UK both use DST (unfortunately) but France is always an hour ahead of UK time. Could this be your problem? (I'm in France as well.)

There was a bug in the GPS time signal affecting older Meade GPS mounts. I vaguely think this raised its head in 2018 but can't be sure. You can risk updating with a fix but I found with my own elderly LX200 that the whole alignment process was far quicker, easier and more reliable with the GPS functions disabled.

Olly

[skyhog]

Olly has just answered my question there. I think it's one of those occasions when technology becomes a hindrance. I turned off the GPS a few years ago when I grew tired of the "taking GPS fix" message appearing for an indeterminate time. I can input the time faster than the fix ever took, and on some nights it was a real pain. 

[Carpo]

Just to answer a few of the questions,  the scope has not got the gps module, so I input that manually. Only needed to do that the first time as it is always based at our house. It has the George Dudash upgrade panel with integral time/date module. I purchased and installed this myself some few years ago after the original pc boards developed the well known LX200 capacitor faults.

The date format is not the problem, I have to enter it as June, not 06 so no confusion with dd/mm or mm/dd.

I wasn't able to check it out last night, hopefully this evening after the forecast thunderstorms have passed (Northern France). I did check out the time accuracy and it has held to the second against my mobile phone, so fingers crossed!

[michael8554]

As always, a LX200 can be a LX200 Classic, or a LX200GPS/LX200R.

Very different beasts, so it's best to specific

The 3 volt coin battery in the GPS/R is to store some GPS information, to speed up the GPS acquisition.

It doesn't store the time and date.

Most if not all Meade mounts don't have a clock module.

Meade is one of the few mounts to have entries such as "June", instead of the easily confused US and European formats of mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy

I too have GPS switched off, entering time and date manually takes seconds.

I use one of those digital clocks that get time information from a Radio Signal.

It's set to GMT/UTC, so I always have DST OFF.

Michael

Edited June 2, 2021 by michael8554

[Carpo]

This is a couple of weeks old now, but I wanted to give some feedback on how I resolved the alignment issue. To recap, my Meade LX200 10" (Classic but with the George Dudash upgrade) wasn't aligning properly even although I had followed all the familiar steps and checks. The final straw was last night when it selected firstly Capella, and then Rigel as the first choice "easy" method alignment stars. I might have believed that in November, but right now they are below my horizon .

I decided to try the "reset" option, and re-entered all the necessary date (a real pain, got to be extra careful!). Anyway, bingo! it chose Arcturus then Altair for alignment, and the second one, Altair, was almost on the middle of the Telrad centre circle, with minimal final adjustment needed. I've never had it as close as that before and I'm wondering if over a period of time, there might be a drifting of settings which might benefit from the reset option every year or so.

So, problem solved, and I had (eventually) a fruitful hour or so revisiting M5, M27 and a few NGC/IC nebulae.

Thanks once again for all the advice and comments!