I would like to open a general discussion about the HDX-110 (Orion) . EQ-8 mount. This mount has been available for a while now, but I have recently received the plates to attach mine to my pier. This thing is a beast in a good way, but has some differences from my previous Sirius EQ-G. I am hoping my questions and ponderings might help others that have are might be considering this mount.
Let's get started with some first perceptions.
I knew it was large. My scope sits about 2-3 inches higher than it did with my EQ-G. Everything about it is larger and heavier, which makes sense given it's weight handling ability. I have it mounted on a 12" concrete pier. The handles are in a nice place for moving it around making its weight seem not quite as bad. I still would not want to use this as my portable mount setup.
I used Ekos to do the polar alignment (of course), doing a bounce east/west method. Solve to the east, make adjustments, solve to the west, make adjustments, solve to the west average the adjustment, solve back to the east average the adjustments. This got me to a 22 arc second repeatable alignment.
- First question then, for anyone that has this mount, how close to 0 did you strive for, and what were you able to achieve?
I then did a two-star alignment and started to jump around to different objects. I had a good bit of trouble with the scope pointing all sorts of places it should not have been when selecting the two stars. On a hunch, I thought perhaps there was some junk left in the EQMod settings from the Sirisu configuration. I completely removed all my stored settings for INDI eqmod, and restarted. After I figured that out, I was very happy with the go-to through kstars. Things were appearing right in the center of the frame. I then tried a test that my Sirius sometimes struggled with. Go-to with a meridian flip. I was shocked at how well it did. I used to capture, solve, and sync another point when doing this because the Sirius would be off a bit. The HDX put objects in the center of the frame flip after flip. Since I was in experiment mode, I decided to try the auto position button. This seemed to find home without any trouble at all, and I set my Park position from the auto-home.
I didn't get a lot of capturing done the first night as I was too busy playing around, but when I did try tracking, it had no trouble staying under 1 arc second RMS, and netted this image of M8 after processing about 30 images with APP:
Flickr M8
Last night I had about enough clear sky to capture 30 frames of M20 before the clouds came in, again processed with APP:
Flickr M20 July 16
Question 2. I know what PEC is, and some about how it works. What I don't know is how it works with INDI/Ekos. How to train it and use it during a session? Where can I find more out (besides source code, of course)?
Question 3. I bought this 2nd hand, and it came with the GPS module. Is this module supported through the eqmod driver? I have not tried using it yet as I have a USB puck unit on the pier already. I would like to move the puck to the portable setup though if the HDX GPS works.
Finally, who all has one of these? I know @knro does. Surely there are others out there. What tricks have you learned?
Thanks!
Jim
