From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: August 2, 2005 5:16:51 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: Astro IIDC 2.02.06 B6

Hi Tim;

On 2-Aug-05, at 4:43 PM, Tim wrote:

So you've decided against Celestron mount control?

Yep - Celestron is a complete kludge (I confirmed this with Darryl Robertson of Equinox) to make work for guiding using the serial port, so I pulled it. For Goto stuff or large directional changes it "sort of" works, but not for tracking.

It doesn't support "real" slewing while tracking. So to move it say 1 arc second west you have to take it out of whatever mode its' in, slew it west 1 arc second AND also add in whatever it was supposed to move during that period of time in that mode, then put it back into the mode it was originally so it will track again. However you can't tell what mode its' in because they don't support reading the mode first, so you can't restore it to whatever it was originally. And I don't want to screw around with making the assumption that it's in EQ N or EQ S or AZM tracking or No mode either.

The Meade scopes (or equivalents) and my IsoOptical USB board ( I hard wired it into my Orion EQ3/2 mount's hand controller) don't work like that at all. It keep tracking and you add an additional movement direction on top of it. This is why I'm saying Celestron is a kludge.

Shoot. On the other hand, guiding with a webcam, unless it can take fairly low-noise

images longer than a second, might not work.

Actually I had pretty good results using 2 copies of Astro IIDC with 2 cameras, one for guiding ( a monochrome Unibrain) and one capturing (PGR Flea 16 bit color). I use a 200 mm F4 SLR M42 screw mount telephoto lens with a 2x and a 3x teleconverter (effective focal length of 1200 mm) as my guide scope and my 127 mm aperture MAK scope with a MOOG focal reducer (effective focal length of 550 mm) for image capture.

I could guide on any star that was magnitude 6 or brighter and that was in downtown calgary (Mag 3 skies on a superb night - normally Mag 1).

TTYL..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com