I did have some clear sky down at sealevel last night, so I decided I have a try using the new PA with my Star Adventurer and the ASI183MC with an Canon 135mm lens.
The sky view from my terrace is hugely limited, basically only ENE to SSW and up to zenith But enough for testing PA.

I had to use the telescope simulator, as the mount doesn't have any connection to the computer, and switch off position hinting for the solver. Amazingly, even with only image scale limits it was blazing fast, solving in a second or so. But without a compass or view to polaris, my initial orientation was largely off.
Without mount control/info I had to use the 'manual slew' option, and hand-turn the SA to various positions.
As it was the first time using refresh/move it took me three tries before I touched the Alt/Az knobs, and re-did the measurement a few times with different pointing positions. The nice outcome was that the determined PAE was quite consistent - though at 17 degrees.... It took me several additional rounds of measure-align, including repositioning the tripod because I hit the alignment limits of the mount. I eventually got the error down to 15'. Trying better was somewhat futile, due to the (in)stability of the photo tripod I used. But all in all a very pleasant experience

One thing I noticed was that - especially for the large error - the movement direction of the star when tuning the mount orientation did not really match the guide lines plotted. So I wondered if there might be still some (small) error in the coordinate conversion that shows up at larger offsets. However, while writing this, I realized that I had used the observation coordinates of the observatory, some 30km away from here. Would that affect things? In principle I'd say no, as you can PA without knowing where you are?

So if weather cooperates I'll try that again tonight, with proper location and the new code. Because of course as soon as I had finished PA last night the clouds rolled over again...
I didn't have debug on, so I assume the logfile isn't too helpful..

Cheers,

Pit

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