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Mount is Confused? Stefan Berg Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy (N.I.N.A. / NINA) · Jerry Gerber · ... · 9 · 332 · 5

jsg 9.55
Jerry Gerber
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Hi All,

I'm trying to get to first light with my remote setup.  I have Stellarium and NINA talking to each other successfully.  Polar alignment is accurate but I haven't done any modeling yet for my 10Micron 1000GM mount.  Will get to that.  But first I want to see if the telescope knows where it is.

NINA and Stellarium have the right time, date and coordinates.  I choose Vega in Stellarium to check focus.  I enter Vega in Nina's framing and select "find coordinates from Stellarium".  It finds it but when I choose slew telescope to object, it says it's below the horizon and plate solving fails.  It's not below the horizon.  It's July in the northern hemisphere, Vega is up. 

Why doesn't the mount know where it is?

Thanks!
Jerry

Additional:  I am now modeling using 50 points.  I keep getting message in NINA that plate solving has failed, using ASTAP.   Hmm…
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Alexn 12.25
Alex Nicholas
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Firstly, does your mount know where its home position is (Not geographical location, but the actual home point… Like, If you left it at the home point, did a 2s exposure with no filter and plate solve / sync coordinates) 

Next, ensure that NINA is syncing the geographical location to the mount when you connect. It's possible that the mount does not know where it is, despite the planetarium and NINA knowing exactly where they are.

Other than that, I would manually slew the scope to a bright star, then do a manual plate solve and sync coordinates on that…. Starting your pointing model with a sync on home, and sync on one other star, It should have a fairly good idea of where it is after that.
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jsg 9.55
Jerry Gerber
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Alex Nicholas:
Firstly, does your mount know where its home position is (Not geographical location, but the actual home point... Like, If you left it at the home point, did a 2s exposure with no filter and plate solve / sync coordinates) 

Next, ensure that NINA is syncing the geographical location to the mount when you connect. It's possible that the mount does not know where it is, despite the planetarium and NINA knowing exactly where they are.

Other than that, I would manually slew the scope to a bright star, then do a manual plate solve and sync coordinates on that.... Starting your pointing model with a sync on home, and sync on one other star, It should have a fairly good idea of where it is after that.

Thanks Alex.   We agree, the mount does not know where it is.  NINA and Stellarium do.  When I choose an object high in the sky, the two apps find it.  But when I choose to slew, I get messages saying the object is below the horizon. 

The mount's home position is aiming roughly at Polaris.  When it's parked in home position, the RA and DEC are close to Polaris.    Not sure how to manually slew to a bright star yet.  Scope is 900 miles from where I am.

I'll try your suggestion of imaging in it's home position and plate solving and see what happens.

Jerry
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jsg 9.55
Jerry Gerber
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Not sure but I think the problem may have been that the mount reports he longitude as being +108 degrees, while NINA and Stellarium show the longitude to be -108. 

I synced the mount to NINA instead of NINA to the mount, and this probably fixed it, it's daytime now so won't know until tonight.
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si-cho
Claudio Tenreiro
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If it helps, this happen to me when the parking position was not the same as the zero position, so when turning the mount on, the first thing I do, to solve the problem, is sending it to zero position, then everything else worked fine. Sometimes to be sure I do ask the mount to confirm the zero position.
Yes, once the scope looked for the moon pointing to the floor smile, but that was the problem, it assumed the parking position as zero. 
Hope it will help.
CS!
Claudio
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jsg 9.55
Jerry Gerber
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Claudio Tenreiro:
If it helps, this happen to me when the parking position was not the same as the zero position, so when turning the mount on, the first thing I do, to solve the problem, is sending it to zero position, then everything else worked fine. Sometimes to be sure I do ask the mount to confirm the zero position.
Yes, once the scope looked for the moon pointing to the floor , but that was the problem, it assumed the parking position as zero. 
Hope it will help.
CS!
Claudio

Dear Claudio,

I am not sure what the zero position is?  Does this mean that the telescope is directed pointed toward the north celestial pole?

Jerry
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si-cho
Claudio Tenreiro
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Hi Jerry,
Yes, actually in my mounts there is a function in the Hand C that gives the option of "search for zero position", also the software that connect the mount by ASCOM driver has that option too. In my case it is the iOptron commander, since my mounts are of that brand. And the mount position itself aligned with the celestial pole when you ask for finding the zero. From that position, it knows where to go for any other coordinate search.
Now I have that in the un-park function, when you un-park your mount, it goes to the zero position automatically.
Best
Claudio
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AccidentalAstronomers 18.64
Timothy Martin
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Jerry Gerber:
I am not sure what the zero position is?


Zero position is an iOptron thing. It has no relevance to a 10Micron mount with absolute encoders. Your mount always knows its exact position. But it may not know where it is on this earth, so the fact that it knows its position isn't much help. Use the hand controller app to set this up. Here's the home screen:

image.png

Click "MENU":

image.png

Then scroll down to "Local Data" with the down-arrow button (the one with the minus sign above the down arrow--not the S button) and click "ENTER". You should then see this:

image.png

Then set the "Date and Time." You use the keypad numbers to enter numbers and you can use the "E" and "W" buttons to move left and right. Click "ENTER" when you're done.

The tricky one is the Local Timezone. You're in the same time zone as me, so make that -07:00:

image.png

Then be darn sure Daylight Sav is set to ON. You'll get to revisit this setting in a few months after your scope slews to and takes a nice closeup hi-res image of the electrical outlet on your observatory wall. 

Then back up one menu from the "Clock" page and go to the "Site" page. Enter the proper coordinates and elevation and you should be good to go. 

If you have an MGPBox and have GPS on in the hand controller app, the MGPBox should actually fill all that in for you. If you don't, getting the right coordinates into the mount should solve your problem. And even if you do, it's not a bad idea to set this up first time out of the chute. Then I have NINA configured like this:

image.png

This syncs NINA to what's in your scope--so everything should now agree. Send me a PM if you still have trouble with it. I've been through this five times now.
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jsg 9.55
Jerry Gerber
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Thank you everyone for responding. I posted this last summer & resolved it many months ago.

Best,
Jerry
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AccidentalAstronomers 18.64
Timothy Martin
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Jerry Gerber:
I posted this last summer & resolved it many months ago.


D'oh! Sorry!
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