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Gus_Smedstad
professor emeritus
Reged: 07/02/06
Posts: 544
Loc: Boston 42° 16' N 71° 08' W
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I primarily do imaging and I live under light-polluted skies, and many of the targets I image are either very dim or simply invisible through an eyepiece. So I'm very interested in anything that will make it reasonably certain that my current target will be firmly in the field of view of my camera when I take a test exposure.
Recently I've switched from the hand controller on my Atlas EQ-G to EQMOD. Mostly because I needed something with more flexibility and accuracy in its star alignment. But it also meant I can directly control the telescope from planetarium software, and this has been a much bigger help than I anticipated.
At $8, WinStars is almost free, and it's been very useful. However, it has a couple of things that annoy and alarm me, and I don't think it's playing well with EQMOD's star alignment.
I'll tell WinStars to lock on a star for alignment, and then I'll use a gamepad to center the star in a reticle eyepiece and mark it in EQMOD. However, when I do this WinStars has noticed the change in the telescope position, and it no longer thinks the telescope is pointing at the star. Maybe this gets corrected somehow, or maybe I should be re-starting WinStars after alignment or something. I'm a little fuzzy on how important this is.
When you start tracking an object in WinStars, it enters "locked" mode. To track something else, you have to press the escape key to "unlock" first, which turns off sidereal tracking. I really wish it wouldn't do that, though I assume that it doesn't introduce pointing errors, and it turns tracking back on when you point again.
How much more will TheSky or Starry Night do for me? ~$120 vs. $8 pretty significant. I gather that both will work with ASCOM and hence EQMOD, but how well will they work with EQMOD's n-star alignment and star sync? I know TheSky would rather use TPoint, but TPoint doesn't seem to offer many advantages over EQMOD's alignment for a guy who has to do a new polar alignment every night, and it's $250 to boot.
- Gus
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Gus Smedstad
Orion Atlas 8 EQ-G
Orion 80mm f/11.4 guidescope
Orion Starshoot Autoguider
Canon 40D
Philips SPC900NC
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JAT Observatory
Space Freak
Reged: 02/20/05
Posts: 5649
Loc: Eastern PA
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TPoint offers better pointing by refining your alignment and correcting your pointing errors due to repeatable problems with your mount flex, backlash, etc.
While I think TPoint would improve your current alignment the problem is TPoint is really for permanent setups. You would have to make a TPoint modeling run every night, which is time consuming. You are better off spending that time doing a drift or iterative alignment and tuning your mount so it has minimal backlash, good balance and as little flex as possible.
I also suggest you look at CDC which is free and supports ASCOM or a program look skytools2.
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-Marcus
The problem with free speech is even the stupid have a voice.
http://jatobservatory.org
12" LX200R on a Paramount ME
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