Hi All,
I am hoping this is a simple fix of something I've never had before. So recently I received my Skywatcher EQ3 back from a service I had done to it, should be as good as new. As I have tried it out tonight, I seem to be getting an issue where the mount can't seem to pin point it's location. I am using Astroberry Kstars/Ekos and when I slew to a star say Procyon it just points in the complete wrong direction, so I gave it a simple task of pointing to Polaris and plate solve Polaris, considering the mount is already pointing in park position at the NCP it should be simple for it, but looking at the coordinate error it just seems way way off, does anyone know why the mount doesn't seem to know what it is pointing at? Any help much appreciated.

This topic has already been discussed a few times.

There are 2 important things to keep in mind:

1. Plate solving near the poles can be problematic. Solve somewhere 30° east or wast away from the poles and you will get successful results.
2. Check whether the clock of your server is synchronised with the clock of your mount. Especially when using a GPS that loses its fix, strange phenomena can sometimes occur.

I’ve never used a Skywatcher mount, so this may be way off base. When you power up a mount neurally assumes you have it in the expected “home” position. For an EQ mount, that would normally be pointing towards the celestial pole (NCP). I would check your manual to see what the Skywatcher expects or to see if you have inadvertently changed it.

Often the first align will actually do a sync, telling the mount “I’m pointing exactly here”. Sounds like that sync is expected to have already happened to say you are at the NCP.

I disagree that plate solving near the NCP is inaccurate. The polar alignment routine works by doing plate solves near the NCP and that works. I agree that any small errors will be magnified if you do a sync or align based on the plate solve very close to the pole, but it should not cause what you are seeing.

I qualify my previous statement a bit:

Plate solving near the poles can be problematic for RA (DEC should be fine).
The explanation is because if aligned 'exactly' at the pole, it only takes 1 arc sec error to give an RA error of 12 hours.

That's why I advised to stay away from the poles to succesfull plate solve.

Hi Thanks all for responses - I figured out what it was, since I recently reinstalled Kstars I lost my current geographical location and timezone so the mount obviously didn't know where to point correctly. After changing my geographic to nearest city and corrected to my timezone all seems to be pointing accurately now.

Thanks
Tariq