Hi all,

The PAA routine suggests to put the mount in home position and point to the ncp OR any point in the meridian. A couple of questions about this. How do I perform the slews, specially if I want to point to any position in the meridian? Manually or with gotos? If the latter, do I need to align the mount previously? My assumption is, in fact, that I need to align and slew the mount with ekos, to let the solver know where is pointing to approximately. Otherwise, the solver may fail due to the huge difference between the real and supposed coordinates. Tonight, in fact, I've suffered many "solver failed" while trying to polar align, but I'm not sure if it's been due to this.

m

You do not need to align after your slew. What I do is bind a keyboard shortcut to "Slew the telescope to the mouse pointer position", and then
use the mouse any my keyboard shortcut, pointing on the skymap approximately where I want the mount to go.

If your park position is roughly pointing towards the pole, and you have a clear view of the sky there, then no reed to move anywhere else.

Either way, after that you run the polar alignment. It will take an image and solve it as part of the polar-alignment procedure. Then it slews in RA the direction and angle you specify, takes a 2nd image, solves that, then slews again, and captures and solves a 3rd time. It calculates the RA-axis' pole from those 3 solved images and directs you how to adjust your mount to correct for polar misalignment.

Clearly, though, as it solves three images during this process, it needs to be able to solve reliably. If you have issues with solving, you need to somehow work them out before starting polar alignment.

Hy

Thanks for the reply.
Well, actually I mean to align before slewing, not after. In any case, the doubt is that I don't see polaris, I should go to a point near the meridian. If so, I guess I have to slew the telescope with ekos, not manually, to let plate solving work properly. I think the problems I had last night with paa and plate solving was camera settings

Yes, if you slew manually and then try to solve with default settings that will fail, as by default it uses pointing info. You can however turn that off for alignment (in Align->Options->Scale&Position). It will then do an all-sky search which is slower, but it does work (tested with my 135mm lens setup).

Ah, great, didn't know that. Thanks for the info. Now it's more clear. Thanks!