Hello to all,
I'm sorry if I'm asking maybe stupid questions but StellarMate is new for me and I've just bought it. You're always talking of AltAz mounts. Is this the Azimutal mount? Jasem directed me to this thread, cause I wasn't sure if my Nexstar Evolution 8HD with its Azimutal mount is supported by StellarMate. It would be supported, but when I'm reading here I get a miitle bit confused. Maybe someone can get me back on the right way thanks a lot to you all!
Best regards
Frederik

OK. Thanks Jasem.

Yes, you are right, AltAz means Azimuthal. But the correct term is Altazimuth mount. To be precise, azimuthal is an adjective of something concerning the axis of motion of azimuth which is only one of the two axes of the altazimuth-mounted telescope. The other is the altitude axis.

Thanks Fabrizio! So this is supported in StellarMate, but the Guiding is a problem, but you're working on this, as I hopefully understood right
Please let me know if I'm wrong.
Thanks a lot for your help!
Best regards
Frederik

I did some test today with your latests celestronaux_eqtrack branch and:

1. Cord wrap even if it is "green" and OFF, I have to turn it ON and OFF to take effect.
2. If my first sync point is on ALT = 0 (any AZ) then alignment seams to work fine.
3. If my first sync point is on higher ALT then alignment is a mess. Adding second sync helping much, but I can not tell more about it's accuracy because of those clouds from over two months now :-/

If I can do any more tests without a sky please let me know.

It appears more users are reporting incorrect position on startup. Just wondering, is this perhaps because the driver relies on INDI::Alignment subsystem, while the mount is already aligned and is sending the *raw* encoder values to the driver while the transformed coordinates are sent off to Celestron/SkySafari software? Not sure if this make sense, this is one of the few mount drivers which I'm not familiar with how it works.

I don't know what kind of connection there might be between the driver and the skysafari. The only coordinate output of the driver toward the rest of the software system is in ReadScopeStatuswhere RightAscension and Declination are the processing result of INDI::AlignmentSubsystem.

What I am not clear about the alignment subsystem is whether it is my responsibility or not to transform from equatorial to altaz before to interact with the subsystem.

Hey Fabrizio, I've been digging into the alignment subsystem a lot lately, and I've found that I think you DO need to interact with it in either equatorial coords with an EQ mount OR alt/az coords for an alt/az mount.

I'm not sure if it has made it into a release yet, but I added some helper methods to the alignment subsystem to make it easier to deal with. You can see them in use in the tests created here:
github.com/indilib/indi/tree/master/test/alignment

Correct, your changes have been incorporated into 1.8.8

Hi All,

Just cross posting from (indilib.org/forum/stellarmate/8610-kstar...e-i-think.html#65874) at Krno's request.

Basically having an issue where KStars won't sync up with the mounts known sky position.

Some logs attached after a 1 star align with Acturus (~ 327:26 / +30:01 right now during the day).. so it thinks its pointing there. But after connecting KStars it's showing due south on the horizon as the scopes position in the sky.

Very strange, any help would be appreciated!

Edit: Mount is a Celestron Astro Fi 5, iOS app i'm using for alignment is Sky Safari Pro

Jack

Hi Jack,
from your posts I understand that you do alignment with skysafari first and then use Kstars. Given that I know very little about skysafari software, it seems to me that the indi_celestron_aux driver is completely unaware of scope alignment performed outside itself. So the positions read from the scope by the driver and sent to Kstars are different from what you expect.
This seems confirmed by your log that tellsA correct procedure can be:
1. align with any system you want outside of Kstars.
2. using scope hand control to slew, point two directions at your choice and for each of them do a manual sync using the Motion Control HC of Kstars: insert manually the RA/DE coordinates given by point 1. system and then click sync.
From this point on, the alignment subsystem of the driver indi_celestron_aux should to be aligned in the same way of the system you used at 1.

Fabrizio

Thanks Fabrizio! Sounds like i've just been missing a step.

When you say HC here "using the Motion Control HC of Kstars".. could you just clarify what you mean by that? I may just be a bit daft but unsure where exactly I should be looking!

Cheers,
Jack