Day 126 Saturday 26th July 2014 Perfect Pointing maintained

When the Paramount ME Mount was homed and slewed it went directly to the first target selected. The object was perfectly centred.

This is the advantage of having a mount that has an absolute mechanical reference position.

Pointing is with reference to that position so as long as the mount is not moved and that homed position is synchronised with the sky and linked to the T-Point model to account for the mechanical variations between "identical" mounts   it will give good pointing.

I note that telescope hosting companies will only accept mounts with absolute encoders as that is the only way they can be used as remote "robotic" mounts.

I believe the SkyWatcher EQ8 can be homed in a similar way bit would need to check that. This is an early preview.

Here is a review from a user positive and negative.

Meanwhile back with my Paramount - the pointing is maintained by the SkyX but my camera software is CCDSoft. I generated an Observing List of galaxies using the SkyX and converted this into an Orchestrate script to automate the pointing and imaging. When I tried to link the camera into Orchestrate it told me that I need a later build of the SkyX software to be able to connect the camera. I thought that I could use the SkyX pointing accuracy with CCDSoft intstead to control the camera -  unfortunately for some reason when I use the SkyX (as opposed to the Sky6) in collaboration with Orchestrate the naming system broke down so that images were being numbered but the object name was not included. Not much point in having a couple of hundred image files without names. I had to abandon the imaging. I could have used the Sky6 but would then have lost the accurate pointing.