Auto star doing my head in

[Nick R]

took my etx 90 pe out for a play tonight ,new charged power pack + new batteries(just to be sure)

Set it up for auto went through the motions ,leval/north etc etc centered on shiny star twice good alialignment little hand set said

Set to go to EG jupiter,****** thing pointed North .set goto the moon it went East:mad:.

Set it to easy <Set up leval ,pointing North etc , centered star yippee

it went the wrong way again ,so iam now sat here typeing this out for idea,s as i nearly launhed it into the sea

[tinvek]

lol, i've got an EQ3-2 which has had an autostar system fitted by someone somehow. it was a good price for a s/h sw 150 on an eq3-2 with a few eyepeices that was motorised and i wasn't bothered how well the goto worked. just as well really as sometimes it has a very strange idea of where some objects are, one night in particular sticks in my mind, it managed to points at saturn, m32 and a few other objects no problem and then decided that the moon was currently somewhere in the direction of australia

[Nick R]

But i want to know why ??:cussing:

[Helen]

Some things you might want to check... (and if it is any of these, don't worry, all of us have done this sort of thing more times than we admit to!)

Is your location correct? Have you put the date in the right format? (some do it the US way ie month then day) is the time correct 12v24 clock or am/pm (I tried a couple of weeks ago to use my scope on the sun and forgot that 12:05 lunchtime was pm not am and wondered why it wouldn't show me the sun!!) . Have you got timezone correct and remembered BST?

and sometimes the scope goes the long way around because of its limited internal movement (eg to stop internal cables getting wound up).

Helen

[Nick R]

all correct Helen, thanks for the advice, its now sat on my table with a hammer hovering over it.Its not going the wrong /long way around ,its just ending up in its own planet

[alfingido]

Does it have gps? If not, check you have your location and time in correctly. Oh, and the date. I made a mistake with my Synscan last month. I was entering the previous month and it went way off trying to find the moon.

Allan

[Nick R]

All set up correctly ,thanks

[barkis]

Talking of batteries, how's the one in the Level North unit doing?

They do run down, Mine had to be changed I remember.

Are you on a wedge, or Alt Az.?

Ron

[Nick R]

Talking of batteries, how's the one in the Level North unit doing?

They do run down, Mine had to be changed I remember.

Are you on a wedge, or Alt Az.?

Ron

iam on altaz ,, battery seems fine in the auto ,, not very old either.Red dot is very bright ,i had it set on high

[greenkat]

Have you trained the drives? calabrated motors ect ?

Try Mike Weasners ETX site its a goldmine of info for all Meade ETX's

Been there, done that with the hammer lol

I got sick of problems and grinding noisy motors with my ETX90 so I bought a Skywatcher mount and took the tube off the ETX. Now I'm a happy chappy

[Nick R]

going to retrain all in a bit , need to glue it back together first ,lol

One other thing is that it /the moter continued to make a noise after i had found a object , and settled

[Capricorn]

May be completely wrong but as well as Lat/Long and Time (Daylight Saving?) do the ETX's have a timezone as in EDT/GMT.

If they have then it is easily overlooked, problem is I cannot recall if they do.

I know it is (should) be meaningless with Lat/Long but somewhere I recall the feature. Since you can tell it you were in London but using PDT as in the west coast of America.

Another thing when started it up they default to 20:00, did you give it the correct time? (I have missed that one). Also the date may still be what it was the last time it was used.

P.S. Motors will make some noise as they goto to an object then continue/try to track it.

[alfingido]

going to retrain all in a bit , need to glue it back together first ,lol

One other thing is that it /the moter continued to make a noise after i had found a object , and settled

The motor will carry on as it tracks, but it really shouldnt be noisy, you will hear it though for a while then it should quiten down. Looks like this is what you are getting.

How long have you had the ETX? I had an ETX125 and it started fine. After a few outings, it started to slew off by itself whilst tracking and couldnt find objects sometimes. I think this was after an Autostar update, resetting to original setting didnt cure it and it got worse.

After a couple of months I sent it back and part ex'd it for an LX90. That was perfect.

Allan

[Nick R]

When training the drive ,does it matter which direction it faces , all my focal views are south Ie street lights etc , Only the sea to the north.

why dont it tell you in the manual?

I would get rid of it sharpish but the mrs bought it for me ,and you know what women are like ,lol

[Capricorn]

Just been looking at the ETX forum on CN, someone has what seems to be ideltical problems. The general opinion is the power supply to the scope, make sure that it is up to it. Batteries are not adaquate.

After that the idea is calibrate the motors and then train them. Seems there is some optical mechanism in the motors that can cause the thing to forget where it is pointing.

[greenkat]

As far as I remember, it doesnt matter what direction the scope points while training drives.

It should ask you to center an object, then it will slew either up/down/left/right then tell you to re-center the object.

Train the drives using an object as far away as possible.

As for power, I did find using a power supply was much better than batteries.

[beetlejuice]

I had this problem with my ETX 125. It was down to the power supply. It just didn't like it if the voltage dropped below 12v. I dumped the batteries and used a 7Ah power pack charged after every session. That cured it up to a point, but a long session, or a cold night, would drain the battery and sometimes the problem returned or error messages would appear on the Autostar. I eventually achieved a 100% solution by flogging it. Nice scopes, shame about the mount.

[Nick R]

Thanks for all the advice ,, What a great bunch of people

regards

Nick