polar mate alignment.

[MarkH]

Has anyone else used an astro engineering polar mate to align a wedge with a Meade system? If so how does the  alignment process interact with the setup process are there any steps that should be ignored or introduced? Comments and abuse gratefully received.

[Mac]

Yup, used to use it all the time, duncan now has it, but from what i can remember, just set the siderial time, plonk it on the top of the wedge
and then adjust the wedge untill polaris is in the circle, the only thing i found was after you stick the scope on there used to be some flexing and polaris would drop
so i used to set it just to the top of the small circle.

Mac.

[MarkH]

Cheers for that Mac, I assume once you switch the scope on it is ready to go straight into star seek and fine tune mode.

[Mac]

From what i can remember, i think it was just turning on and then doing the star alignment and after that it worked. The only other thing that used to give me strange problems was when using astro software to control the scope, syncing on the stars produced weird offsets, i eventually found it was to do with the time and time zones and BST, eventually i turned BST off on everything, scope and pc, and it eventually worked. One other thing that ocasionally happens is the inversion of N & S on the scope, and again i never managed to sort that one out.

Mac.

[MarkH]

Thanks Mac, that pretty much sums up all I was trying to find out. Problem is that info doesn't exist in any manual. Trouble exists between bridging two manufacturers. Thanks again.