Move mount Alt/Az - Tracking must be off?

[Jupiter]

I could use some help understanding this behavior of the sequencer. When I try to do a sequence step that moves the mount (it is an equatorial mount) to an Alt/Az coordinate, I incur an error indicating that the tracking on the mount must be off. If I turn the mount tracking off and then execute the move mount to Alt-Az, it works fine; this seems to support that the mount is capable of accepting Alt/Az gotos.

I scanned the Sharpcap documentation and the sequencer commands and there does not seem to be a command to turn on/off tracking?? This is certainly not a big deal and I think I may be able to work around it by writing and calling a special program that communicates directly with the mount.

Why would I ever consider using Alt/Az gotos on an equatorial mount, one may ask. I am working on a automated alignment script and it occurred to me that the usual approach would be to align to a star, sync the mount and then move on to the next alignment star, repeat until the alignment is complete.

However, with plate solving, there is nothing sacrosanct about doing a goto to star location. Given that is the case, it would seem to make sense to goto a number of locations based on Alt-az coordinates, rather than star locations and do plate solving and syncing at those locations. If this worked, it would eliminate the need to pick the stars for each alignment session.

[admin]

Hi,

what you are encountering is a 'feature' of the ASCOM driver you are using - some drivers will happily slew to AltAz co-ordinates when tracking, others won't (there is nothing in the ASCOM standard documentation that defines whether it is legitimate - at least nothing I can see). That essentially explains why this isn't something I can document in the manual, since the info would vary from mount to mount.

In general, there's not really much of a reason to use the slew to AltAz co-ordinates, but it was easy to add to the sequencer, and someone will no doubt find a use for it.

You can turn tracking on or off using the sequencer with the 'Set mount tracking rate to ...' command - one of the options is to set 'None' as the tracking rate.

cheers,

Robin

[Jupiter]

Robin,

Thanks again for your help. I didn't see that set tracking rate could be set to none. Off to experiment.

[Jupiter]

Just tried setting the tracking rate name to "none" and then commanded the Alt/Az move and it it worked a treat. Thanks again!