Telescope Reviews: SynScan Goes To Goofy Land

OK, SynScan Groupies, here's another case for the "Wow That's Goofy" experience book of SynScan.

Recently I told of how I discovered two causes for three years of alignment grief; a mismarked compass, and loose mounting plate allowing shifts in DEC during movements. Fixed 'em both, great results on the next three school star party outings.

So, last night had another outreach event. Showed up, aligned the tripod with the compass (amazing how many schools have an outdoor basketball or tennis court with a seam aligned north-south to help!), leveled it and set up. As darkness closed in, I sneaked a peek in the Telrad and holy cow, Polaris was on the edge of the inner ring! Yikes, never did THAT well before.

So, as twilight set in, as is usual for these events the crowd was formed so all four of us with scopes went to Jupiter while awaiting darkness. I had used the Syntrek GPS on startup, so the time and location were good. On the GOTO to Jupiter, no polar alignment, no star alignment, it only missed by about 1/4 of a degree! Had lots of oohs and aahs, as usual. Then, as the dark set in, I skipped the polar alignment and went right to a 3 star alignment. I just used the three in order suggested by SynScan; Arcturus, Vega, Altair. Each was less than 1/2 a degree off. Following Altair, I got "Alignment Failure"!!! So I said, what the heck, fuggedaboutit, and just went to Mizar for a while, then NGC457 (The Owl/E.T./Johnny 5 cluster, always a hit at elementary schools), and finished the last half hour or so on M27 (The Dumbbell). Every GOTO was on the edge of a 110X/.6 degree FOV eyepiece. Go Figure.

The only thing I can come up with for this one is that, when the mount top plate is tight, there is no detectible cone error in my mount and the polar alignment somehow was off enough that the cross meridian cone error correction in the firmware gave a solution it couldn't deal with.

Anyway, here's another case for the What The Heck list. I should have stuck with a two star alignment, but I fat fingered the setup, got stuck in the three star process, had 15 or 20 folks waiting, so I forgot how twitchy this mount is on three star alignments if the mount does not have any cone error; must be a divide-by-zero in there somewhere.

Compass sure is working now!!

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Jim

A Bad Night With A Telescope
Beats A Good Night Doing Anything Else
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