Slight misalignment

[Manok101]

Ok so my goto computer works perfectly... well almost, except for it has a tendency to find objects and even if my alignment is nearly spot on it will find the object way to the left, the ground seems fairly level, and so my question is, does the alignment need to be exactly perfect to be mostly in the eyepiece?

[aussi skywatcher]

I have been having similar problems with mine (Vixen skypod) - using it on its tripod means setup is often long and tedious ie leveling and direction so I have just made a permanent pier cemented into the ground. I spent some time 2 nights ago going through the set up and I must admit it worked fine but some objects were not centered exactly but were generally well in the fov of a 25mm eyepiece. I have made sure that all the time zone, position data etc were correct and followed the setup procedure fully. Using it on a pier will hopefully reduce setup time as I have now got index marks on the unit so that the initial line up will always be the same and so far its been good. So I guess the answer to your questions is -yes get it all as exact as you can- its worked for me - look forward to hearing how you go.

Paul

[Astro_Baby]

Dontknow about Vixen but my HEQ5 will always get an object pretty close to centre in a 25mm eyepiece.

My experience with it has been thats its spot perfect so long as

1 the mount has been levelled fairly well

2 polar alignment is accurate

3 alignment stars are set precisely using at least 2 star alignment.w

4 during alignement the scope isnt jiggled too much to centre the alignment stars...ie its taken to the star in two or three smooth slews. Not done in a kind of 'up a bit, down a bit left a bit, up a bit, right a bit' kind of way.

Perhaps mine does well because when new there was quite a lot of play in the axis whereas as after rebuilding and tuning there is none at all.

[Jimmy Stix]

My Skywatcher GoTo accuracy seems to vary quite a bit. Sometimes when I have done a 2 star alignment it's almost bang on and other times I have to move my object to centre quite a bit. It's always within the eyepiece though!

I am not experienced enough to know quite why but I assume, as Astro-Baby has stated, it depends how much time you take to make sure everything is right.

[brantuk]

If I remember the manual correctly, don't SW divide the sky up into 8 quadrants and only guarantee the accuracy within a particular quadrant? I also seem to remember that it says you may have to use the PAE to correct it when doing a wide slew to another quadrant.

The corrections aren't huge and very easy to do - matter of seconds. Of course, I'm referring to the alt/az goto so there may be a difference with the eq versions

[Manok101]

Thanks for the advice, I'll try that tonight.