Decided to get out and try to collect more data last night and had the same problems with M16 being confusing for the mount. Earlier in the evening, I had figured out how to hook up SkySafari Pro via my cellphone.
Initially, I thought this would be my salvation. But whenever I opened SkySafari and connected
it to the mount, it thought I was pointing at the southern horizon. When I moved the scope via the arrow buttons and aligned it on a known object, the EAST button on the screen wouldn't work. AND the goto function wouldn't work. Also, the CP4 controller on the mount showed a yellow light which indicates an error in the controller. WTF.
This also means that I have to uplug everything to connect SkySafari again. And even then, SkySafari sometimes would throw up a connection error. The trick to resetting everything was to first disconnect the battery to the mount >sigh<, then forget the WIFI connection to the CP4 controller which means I have to type the password in again. Then I would be back to SQUARE ONE, which means I've wasted 15 minutes of my life... yet again.
After wasting two hours on this nonsense, I ended up just manually pointing the scope to M16. On a lark, I tried connecting SkySafari and it did align! And the GTO driver in windows showed the correct coordinates for M16. WTF. Anyways, I proceeded to collect about 4 x 20 min frames and the moon showed up at the beginning of the last frame.
At this point, I was poking around the driver settings and it was set to AP900 and CP3. >sigh<
I was really tired at this point and I don't know if I changed the driver settings to AP1200 and CP4 before my last attempt to connect to SkySafari or not. IF I did change it before my last attempt to connect to SkySafari that would suggest a "rational" explanation as to why SkySafari didn't work. But rational explanations sometimes seem a scarce commodity at midnight.
One thing that did happen was that when I hit goto on SkySafari it wanted to do a Meredian Flip which I let it do. Judging on the orientation of the scope, it seemed like it had another good hour before having to flip. I had to "sheppard" the cables as it flipped and it reminded me how far I was from having an "automated setup". I decided to collect one more frame even with the 50% illuminated moon just to see if the image was okay. It was okay.
So, I was sitting there at 3:15-ish am thinking I should pack up. But earlier I had noticed my PEMPro shortcut on the desktop and I thought I should give it a shot. Though exhausted, I fired it up and saw a message about my trial being expired! I paid for PEMPro like a year ago and when it asked me if I wanted to download the latest version, I expected nothing to work.
Well, it did work. But of course there were issues. The default configuration seems to want to connect to PHD2 and use the guide camera. Well, I encountered a whole host of errors and troubleshooting took another 30 minutes. I had tried this a year ago and I had to download a special version of PHD2 that was compatible with PEMPro. Well... it seemed like PEMPro was trying to connect with my regular version of PHD2 and I couldn't figure out how to point it to the special version. >more sighs<
Eventually, I switched the camera from PHD2 to the main ATIK camera and everything basically worked from there. I wish I had made a screenshot, but I was able to record a 10 arc sec periodic error (from peak to peak). Then I was able to program the correction into the CP4 mount controller.
Now, I get to finally use "PEM" in the GTO drivers the next time I fire up the mount! I'm pretty sure the PEC will get the error down to 4 arc seconds which is just a guess based on online accounts of how much PEC can help. :)
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