Yes…It’s TRUE. I used a 3D printer to solve a problem I have had with my Celestron CGEM mount ever since I bought it. The first issue I focused on was Periodic Error Correction (PEC). My very old CGEM is of the vintage when Celestron used non-integer gearing in their mounts. The periodic error requires 3 rotations of the worm gear for the error to repeat. The PEC logic they installed in the CGEM assumed that the periodic error repeated for every rotation of the worm gear. My take on…
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Open PHD2 Multistar Guiding – Part 3
In this blog post, I will try to explain the changes I made to the multistar code to address the issues I discussed in Part 2. A change of Focus The flagging code in the official version of Multistar guiding is focused on keeping the secondary star deviations close to zero. This sounds good!…but it completely ignores what the primary star is witnessing. The primary star may be showing that a significant guiding error is occurring, but the secondary stars are being flagged and ignored simply because they agree with…
“First Light” using an Off-Axis Guider
Finally the weather cleared and warmed up. I had been fiddling with my off-axis guider(OAG) set-up during the daytime and I made one revision which I really like. Originally I was using a 1mm diameter wire as a spacer between the OAG and my filter slider. This wire seemed too flimsy and it was not big enough to cater for using a 3mm plastic shim. There was just barely enough threads left on the M42F to M48M zero clearance adapter to thread onto the filter slider. I had ordered Baader…
Using ASCOM with LabVIEW
I was asked if I could offer some help with programming LabVIEW to control a telescope mount using ASCOM. I decided to create a sample vi that explains the basics. The example is written in LabVIEW 2019. If you don’t have LabVIEW installed on your computer, the sample will be completely useless to you. Peter ASCOM Interface Fundamentals Opps! I forgot to include a Close Reference block where I disconnect the scope