My long tern goal is to learn to help rather than ask for help, My short term goal is to get Ekos to control my CGX mount. I'm brand new to astrophotography so I'm learning everything at once. So part of what I see as problems may just be my bad expectations about how the system should behave. There is clearly an interaction between Ekos tabs and Celestron_aux driver. The driver depends on the alignment module and the aux code which is what actually talks to the mount.

So here is my immediate question. I can "sync" the mount to a location, say Polaris, so the mount knows its current position (encoder values) map to this particular (RA,DEC). I can save this config as the parking position and the mount will reliably slew to this spot on Park. Cool. Now with no other alignment done, I think I could use Kstars to select and 'goto' another (RA,DEC). My expectation is
1. Kstars says to the controller 'goto RA2, DEC2.
2. The controller knows it is at RA1, Dec1 so, to go to RA2 DEC2 it computes the change in RA and DEC to get to RA2,DEC2.
3. The controller says to the mount, thru aux command, to rotate RA by delta-RA and DEC by delta-DEC.
4. The mount knows how many encoder steps per delta-angle so it happily applies the delta-RA and delta-DEC.
Of course the position is close, but not the real location because the single synced position is only roughly aligned manually during setup.

The observed behavior when I try this is mixed. Some times the motion is reasonable but maybe East-West is reversed? Other times, I abort the motions because the scope is going to hit the mount. So which components know what when? The alignment module is keeping track of encoder values, so maybe the mount isn't as smart as I expect and the aux command to the mount is goto RA-endoder value and DEC-encoder instead of apply a delta-angle. Reading the code, or docs (!) can educate my expectations. Or you can spoon feed me! I expect your going to tell me I have to do the entire alignment procedure first, but why?

My second immediate question is why can't I use the manual slew controls to move the mount. What does a buttons labeled N,S,E,W mean when I have a mount that moves in RA,DEC? Using the buttons doesn't move in a way that makes sense.


Thanks!

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