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Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

How do I measure the UP distance in the Dome Slave settings?

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I am entering the various Slave settings in the Dome driver and one is for the UP distance. From where do I measure from and where do I measure to? I don’t understand what I am measuring.

Thanks!

Peter
3 years 6 months ago #60632

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Essentially you are aiming to establish the distance from the intersection (pivot point) of the Dec/RA axis relative to the dome "origin" (0,0,0) - where the dome is a hemisphere (ie: assume the walls don’t exist) - this also assumes your mount is polar aligned and facing north or south depending on your latitude.

It’s something of a dark art and I’ll point you to a better thread shortly, but in essence if your counterweights are horizontal, how far up/down in millimeters is the point around which RA and Dec “meet”/intersect relative to the bottom lip of the dome - up being a positive and down a negative number.

Having been through this a few times, I WILL write something up about this as it’s horribly confusing to everyone.

Same idea for north/south offsets as well as east/west - the ease with which you can determine these through measurements is a function of your mount, though you may get luck and find drawings which help you derive them through trig.

NOTE: these offsets are NOT the pier position, which can itself ALSO be different, you are concerned only with where the key axis intersect in 3D space.

Because nothing is ever as simple as it seems in astronomy, there is a FOURTH dimension, being the OTA offset - this is essentially how “wide” is the farthest optical point of your OTA tube is from the same pivot point. To be honest I am not entirely clear I understand this myself but have found that generally if I use the aperture plus the offset from teh RA/DEC pivot point to the saddle plate I generally get it about right.

Chris Rowland has a rather more empirical method here (indilib.org/forum/general/7125-problem-s...-indi-maxdomeii.html) but note that he does not have a silver bullet for the Z (up/down) axis.

A decent tape measure will generally do the job.

As you will learn army my own challenges, this all depends on the mount reporting pier side correctly to INDI, the news is not good if you are using a Paramount sadly, the Paramount driver either can't or is incorrectly reporting the pier side so in my case I have had to use TheSkyX to control the dome slaving.... but you’re not, so all good.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jasem Mutlaq
Last edit: 3 years 6 months ago by Paul Muller.
3 years 6 months ago #60637

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Please let me know once you have the write-up ready and I'll add it to the dome documentation!
The following user(s) said Thank You: Paul Muller
3 years 6 months ago #60641

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any format you prefer it in Jassem?
3 years 6 months ago #60652

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You just respond here and I'll format it later, the content is what matter!
The following user(s) said Thank You: Paul Muller
3 years 6 months ago #60711

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