amI being silly?

[R2-ditt0]

hi all....have been a bit frustrated with the weather lately so I thought I'd have a play:eek:.....spend some time familiarising myself(did I spell that right:confused:)with the scope and I was training the drives when I noticed that IF not careful you could crash the drives......remember this is all so new to me...only seen an alt/az type camera mount before and this gem is taking a bit of getting use to!....now the question I have relates to the goto aspect of my mount.....does it know that it might crash the mount?....IS it dependant on the initial set up of the mount?is autostar clever or am I being dumb?

[John]

What scope do you have ?

[Capricorn]

Most goto's are dependant on the initial setup, there will be some small print saying that the scope/mount should be rotated one way into the stops then rotated back what is in effect half way and started from there.

The Meade scopes say to start pointing north and level, although the Skywatchers do not specify the same it is a good idea to adopt the same initial position. Also makes it easier for you to have some idea where N/S/E/W is when asked by the scope.

Owing to the small print I guess that when powered up the mount assumes that it is at the nice midpoint and so can rotate either direction. If you haven't positioned the starting position as expected then it simply hits an end stop and keeps driving.

So the answer is basically that they are not overly intelligent and will happily ram themselves into any end stops and keep trying to push through.

[brantuk]

You should be able to set the slew limits on both SW and Celestron goto handsets such that you don't crash the mount. However they don't know the size of scope you have on the mount so you'd have to set them specifically for a particular scope.