6 replies to this topic

[RadOD]

Twice now, upon the first 360 second exposure everything is tracking ok for several minutes then all of a sudden...

 

Not sure what this means.  A bear came out of hibernation and whacked the scope?

[RadOD]

Clouds?

[happylimpet]

Its notable that it wasnt making any (well, a couple of tiny) corrections until the 'incident', and these are in Dec. Maybe the RA calibration was wrong so when it needed to do a correction, suddenly everything flew off the wrong way.

[sg6]

Someone here had a similar problem, tracking would go beserk. Three days of it, then they sat and watch the mount and saw an owl had taken to perching on the scope and use it as an outlook to hunt for mice etc from.

 

Threw the tracking for a while, ruined a few exposures, they did get some good photo's of an owl perched on a scope. Not sure what they did about it, for all I know the owl is still perching on the scope, and every night a couple of exposures are sacrificed.

[RadOD]

I'm starting to find some similar reports (https://www.cloudyni...ioptron-cem25p/) with ioptron mounts.  I'm going to update the firmware if I'm not on the latest.

 

After the latest time this happened, the mount kept reporting dec was 22 and I would plate solve and it would be about 80.  I repeatedly tried to adjust in cartes du ciel. CDC would report the new coordinates, but as soon as SGP told it to slew dec would again be off pointing at 80, reporting 22.  This has happened before and aligning with the hand controller seems to fix it.  But I really don't understand the problem well.  Partly because my interest in problem solving wanes at 2am.  Partly because aligning with the hand controller is hard enough let along when its cold and the screen takes forever to update after every button press!

 

12 hours of dark, 8 hours futzing with it and I got 7 6-minute subs.  The good news is I finally built a battery box that kept things powered all night at 5 F.

[Jon Isaacs]

I wonder if this is temperature related. Maybe the mount is binding slightly.

Jon

[Eddgie]

A long shot, but did you notice in the news that there were 700 earthquakes in Alaska in recent weeks?

 

Not saying this is the issue, but at the same time, you are not that far away from Alaska and if your mount is not super-solid, it might be a possibility.   

 

https://earthquaketr...n-alaska/recent