lukepower

Daniel, you can set up astrometry.net in local, but Sequencer won't use it right now. By the way, it is - in my experience - usually slower than Pinpoint as long as the FOV is halfway there. If your pointing is completely off, Astrometry works better....

John, I fully agree. The thing that pisses me off is that it's not a new situation. If asa comes now with promises I simply would not believe them. I had contact over the years with quite a few guys at Asa and it has always been a delight. My guess is that even they don't know what Philipp Is doing with the software... Best regards

This all looks like a dejá-vue of last year's thread. I on my side stopped hoping for any improvement as I feel the software part of ASA is made sort of "if it works its fine". The beta releases are also being updated very slowly. There are stupid bugs around since years. But hey, I put a lot of bucks in my system and once it works I won't do anything to it. In another life, I would for sure buy another mount...

Maxmriot, yes, but autoslew would have to expose that interface... Should be pretty easy to implement if the coder wants so...

Regrettably there is no such interface in ascom, so no you can't

Hi Nigel, maybe I can help with my experience. Please note that my bent pier has no way of changing altitude, just azimuth. I found out soon that it was not precise enough (we are talking of about one degree too low), so I had to add some steel plates between the base plate and pier on one side to compensate for it. What I did were severeal iterations of: Take a few pointing exposures Let Autoslew calculate how far off the alignment was Add or remove steel plates as needed I found out that I had to be quite close to the perfect position to not have trouble afterwards with the slews, especially when slewing from east to west. But this might be also caused by the long focal lenght (3550mm) at that time. Damn, it would hae been way easier with some tool to compensate for altitude. I ended to be within 2 arcminutes from the ideal position, and thats fine for me with subexposures of up to 20 minutes. Best regards

So here is the latest image I have been able to take: I don't really know where to look to get those stars round, all over the field the stars change shape: Frm squeezed to elongated to triangular Does anybody here have an idea?

Hm, good question... I Put one of the logging SQM meters for half a year up high here in the Dolomites (around 2400m), and constantly got to 21.7-21.8 on moonless nights. Considering that this place is only about 5km from my observatory, it is constantly better In theory Unihedron has calibrated each unit before shipping...

Well, doesn't seem too bad to me... What you could also try is to limit the speed of the mount and the acceleration. It's located in Autoslew under Drive -> Slew Speed. I have for both axes "Slewingspeed" at 30 and "Acceleration" at 10, because of the weights involved...

HI George, well, mine had two trips to Austria and back till it worked But hell yes, I completely understand you... Maybe you get it fixed somehow yourself. Another thing I had once: I didn't loose the screw of the DEC axis, resulting in higher than normal currents.

I would consider: changing USB cables trying another power supply sending the mount back to ASA for a complete check

Hi George, well, let's see what ASA says. I had a similar problem and it turned out that the electronics were defective. It sound slike a power surge, maybe on the DEC axis motor, which in turn makes too much noise on the electronics board (ASA told me that there was actually a voltage drop, which disabled for a few moments the FTDI chip connecting the electronics to USB). Does the error happen with the scope in a certain position? If yes, it might still be a balancing thing. If not, then I would think something with the electronics or motors is wrong. Considering the 5 amps of the motors it sounds like a possible cause... I am running with 120kg of scope on my 85XL, and I never get over 4amps (but had a hell of a time to get it balanced).

Hi George, I got those errors when thre was a bad connection to the mount. However, this meant that I lost the connection completely (had to power cycle the mount and begin everything again). It might mean that the mount reached it's power output limit and the electronics lost for a moment the connection over USB to the computer... Did you had any problems after these lines in the log?

HI George, I would say: Give it a shot

Max, maybe I wrote it wrong, but you can keep your mount and put it on a bent pier. The second option is to switch to the XL version (with all modifications and costs).

Hi max, you have to consider two things: ASA offers the upgrade to the DDM85-XL version, where they basically change the electronics, the motors, and some mechanical things so that it works only on a bent pier. Thenm they also offer the pier which, in my opinion, is quite expensive. You could of course alsobuild a pier yourself and put your mount - without much modifications - on it

Here a star test (if I can call it like that). Maybe somebody with a corrector can confirm the out-of-focus pattern of this image is okay, or if there is another error in there (dunno which one, though). The secondary is not perfectly aligned, but I guess it's not the biggest problem right now

Hi there, I have been working these days to go (for the first time) to the Newton configuration of my scope. It all looks good, but once tested on the stars I found out that there was no way to get in focus. I would somehow need to go deeper with the corrector into the focuser. This would, however, result in the corrector getting into the light path. Reducing the distance between secondary and primary is not an option, as it would prevent me from using the system in Cassegrain mode. I wonder if I could remove one of the outer rings which right now sits between focuser and the camera adapter (it is located on the outside of the corrector). Any ideas? By the way, my DDM85-XL is now loaded, on the scope side, with about 115kg of weight (tube, camera and counterweights), and runs smoothly

Hi George, in my case (my OTA just went through a transformation from Cassegrain to Newton) I had to add two 2-Euro coins as counterweight on the opposite side of the OTA to the camera, otherwise I had position errors all the way... Of course, this can happen with a tube with 60cm in diameter, I suppose...

Wow... amazing!

Pelle, well, in theory one could have a bad pointing model - resulting from inaccurate data (shifting mirror, flexture and so on) - that could actually lead to elongated stars. Do you get the elongated stars only with long exposures or not? Let's say you make a 5 s exposure, and one with 60s: Are the elongations similar, or is the longer exposure different? If they are similar, you have a collimation problem here (I could write a book about this, after struggling for months to get it right). If the short exposure is ok, you either have some severe flexure or a bad pointing model... Autoslew won't report errors as long as it thinks it is driving the mount right.

Bernard, these mounts are using relative encoders - as long as the software is running (or probabily the mount's electronics are powered up) they track the movements and know this way their position. After a power cycle (power off then power on) they suppose that the mount has not moved. If it has, take care as it can hit everywhere. Michael's suggestion of a webcam is a very good one I hit quite a few times the pier or the roof when I got my mount There are other mounts around - and possibly the DDM160 (not sure) which use absolute encoders: They do not loose the position even without power

Beautiful! Great image Antonio

Wow, cool! Great images with that scope!

Hi there, I decided to share my raw data with the world, as I sometimes struggle to elaborate everything and am also curious to see if others can manage to get a better result than me Here is the link: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BzUj2DvRwlRfcldvUUpNdWVkZzA&usp=sharing I am synching basically all images taken with Sequencer to that folder - both flats and normal files. You are welcome to use them under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which basically means everybody can use it as long as a reference to the source is there. Of course I would also be happy to see the results of elaboration Please also note that, due to Italy's asshole slow internet, the upload will take a while