Another CG5-GT Question!

Hi there,

Yes, it's mount trouble again Just thought I would write this up in case anyone experienced a similar problem and knows the solution. I am probably doing something very stupid :oops:

I was using it with my Newtonian quite successfully for a couple of months but I just changed to a Meade SCT, reset the mount to factory defaults so it would re-adjust for the cone error, etc.

Now the strangest thing happens. No matter what alignment stars I choose the mount will ALWAYS point more than 15 degrees lower towards the horizon. I expected some innacurracy but also expected it in the east to west plane. The confusing thing is that this even occurs on the 3rd star! It also happens if I polar align the mount with my polar scope. Tracking is now so bad that I cannot even do a 10 second exposure without trails. I can see something else is wrong because it sometimes takes forever to calibrate the alignment.
Scope and mount are balanced, levelled, polar aligned and total weight, including guidescope is about 9-10 KG.

Anybody seen this kind of problem before?
I have entered the correct coordinates and timezone.

I logged the question to Celestron support but doubt I will hear back for a while.

Thanks for reading!

Trev

Trevor - 15 degrees sounds like 1 hour... Double check the times in the keypad/mount. If this doesn't fix the problem, set the clock time to plus one hour and see what happens. Try with minus one hour also.

If its any help, I have yet to get this right in the AP1200 - I always end up 15 degrees out at the start of the night. But a simple synch does the trick.

Hope this helps... Let us know how you get on.

Cheers

Dave

Trevor...sounds like the mount is not Polar Align.....if it's Polar Aligned it would track great.....my mount is inaccurate....but has great tracking...so it's polar aligned pretty well You might want to double check your Polar or do Declination Drift :

Thanks for the replies guys.
I tried changing the time as 15 degrees was a bit suspicious. However it just made it worse.
Marty, I'll try the polar alignment from the menu. I forgot about that function. Was only using my polar scope to do so.

Bizarre, it was working last week.

Thanks again,

Trev

Trevory, check your not putting the date in wrong ways, the american made cg5 needs the date as mm/dd/yyyy format. I made that mistake one or twice.

Yep, got caught out on that one a couple of times also, but double-checked that it was 04-28-2006 last night.

I'm currently charging the power supply up. I think it was near full last night but maybe I am wrong. I forgot that I did have an errant slew last night; it would not stop without me hitting the arrow buttons. It also tried to go past it's limit on the RA axis so it must have either not realised it was slewing or it thought it was pointing elsewhere. I seem to remember the guys on the Celestron_AG group reporting that this was usually caused by a power problem. I hope that was it.

Thanks,

Trev