A question for fellow 10Micron users out there who are farther up the SGP/10Micron integration learning curve than I.
Best practice, as I understand it, is to build the pointing model for your 10Micron mount and then turn off synch refines, in order to prevent any corruption of the model from that point forward.
However, when I do that, and try to use the autocenter functionality in SGP, it thows an error message saying that it cannot run autocenter, because mount synch has been turned off.
Anyone aware of a way to both protect the integrity of the mount model and use the autocenter functionality?
I’m not certain that synch adds point to your model. In fact, I have synch on and never observed additions of points. You may want to test that first.
Why would you want to do this?
I never platesolve anymore with this mount.
When the model is accurate, pointing is dead on.
That’s what puts 10M mounts apart from the flock.
Just shooting from the hip . . . . Bull’s eye everytime.
Fair question. I have a mobile set up, and need to redo everything every night. That said, by the time I have polar aligned and built a model, my alignment is usually accurate to within 20 arc seconds and the RMS of the pointing model is accurate to within 5"-8", so I suppose I could go without the plate solving and at my current sampling, be within 2 or three pixels of dead on.
I loose the security blanket of plate solving, but as you point out, if this mount, properly configured, needs the plate solving, something larger has gone wrong…
You’ve done some 85 (more or less) platesolves around the sky to build the model.
So the sync should not add any value to your pointing (and tracking) accuracy.
Even after a auto-meridian flip I do not bother to platesolve.
In case your pointing is off, you may have a clock (time) issue there.
Your alignment figures are typical for most of us.
With that I can take 30 min unguided images.
10" f4 newt Atik16200 10M HPS1000
That all makes sense. I will give it a go. Will greatly simplify/speed up things (excluding a rotator situation I suppose).
Can I ask what kind of eccentricity you are ending up with? I’ve been getting between 0.4 and 0.6 with 10min Ha subs using a fsq106 at 530 with an SBIG 16803 (9 micron pixels) for a sampling of 3.5”/pixel. All mounted on a Gm2000, with a dovetail plate on top and bottom of the rings for extra rigidity, an Eagle3 with short cables connecting everything so no cable “jiggle” happening.
I’m newish to this level of equipment and just trying to get a sense for what I should be striving for as “best reasonable” outcome.