Hi all,
Getting my rotation gear going and could not get it to work with the ASCOM device Hub. Measured, remeasure, fiddled with parameters all to no avail.
Found an alternative program written by Kathleen Walker - http://www.hallsharbourobs.ca/articles/domesync.php
Downloaded, installed, put in my parameters and it simply worked.
Hope that helps,
Peter
Hi Steven,
I too am a total beginner at this synchronization piece.
however, from what I understand, your mount would need to be reasonably polar aligned for things to work. By reasonably, I mean I within a few degrees. You are correct in thinking if you pick up the mount and turn it around the dome would have no clue that had occurred.
my understanding of it is as follows.
1) mount can tell you where it is pointing and if you have it more or less polar aligned that is ok
2) you can tell the dome where it should position itself
3) the critical piece is the software that reads the position of the mount and then calculates where the dome should rotate to.
when I was using ASCOM Device Hub for 3) I found my dome aperture was always too far north and nothing I fiddled with in terms of scope position, dome radius, etc, would fix this.
in my exasperation I went looking for the calculations that would need to be implemented with the idea of writing my own application. Fortunately, that is when I stumbled upon Kathleen’s software and I gave it a try. It was a joyful moment when it worked!
I have met Kathleen a few times at our local astronomy club and she is a very accomplished astrophotographer and computer programmer amongst, I have no doubmany other things.
hope that helps,
peter
Peter, this is very interesting. I have been struggling with getting my mount, scope and dome sync to match up for all of my visible sky, it's always off by some little or lot error just enough to have the slit partially blocking the 11" Edge or completely missing the slit in some parts of the sky. Other times its dead on.
This may sound like a beginner question, and it is, if the RA, HA, DEC, Altitude and Azimuth come from the scope do you have to polar align the mount first? It seems that the mount does not have any idea of where it's pointing. If I should pick up the mount and turn it around it would report the same as if I hadn't moved it, or am I missing something?
Are there any other pointers to using DomeSync?
Thanks,
Steven