So, I was writing an email to Charles where I was trying to figure
out my recent goto problems. I decided not to bore him with my
imaging travails so I'm simply cutting from the email and pasting it
here:
Speaking of 75% confidence in
astrophotography (my number is like 50%), I've been having this crazy
problem with the AP900 and goto. For the last 4-5
times I've used
the mount, the goto's will be fine.
But for a few objects like M16 (Eagle), I'll get an error "-45
below horizon". I keep thinking that the mount got
confused as to where it is.
But when I look at the mount's
coordinates, it's all accurate. And I can slew to things
around M16 which seems crazy because then when I type in M16, it
gives the error again.
SO, I manually pointed the scope/mount at
M16 and hit "sync". When I look at the
coordinates, it thinks the object is at -45 declination!
It's actually at around -19. So,
my working theory is that the database in
the hand controller has been corrupted for some targets. When
my laptop is connected to the mount, it looks like the hand
controller information
trumps everything else so when I try to
slew to M16 via my imaging software, I get all kinds of weird
errors. So, my plan is to replace the battery for the hand
controller and
update the handcontroller firmware.
Fun times with telescopes...
I have not read the more recent posts, but bad firmware would have been my guess. I'm never bored with defect detection. :)
ReplyDeleteYeah, on the Astro-Physics website, it mentions this exact problem where a dropped keypad can interrupt the electricity to the object database and corrupt the information. But the stars don't get corrupted because that information is stored in a separate place. So the obvious comment is why not keep everything stored in the place that doesn't get corrupted?
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