Mr. Burke's is a gentle, accurate constructive criticism.  Whilst one may find "the answer" to most any question by searching the forums of the main group and subgroups (although one must search each one individually), and the engineer is accessible, responsive, and thorough in a way that is unprecedented in my experience (go Jerry), paper manuals in the box for the machine, and the app, are a reasonable expectation.  I know that ES products are geared to make high-end astronomy gear economically available to even beginners, and beginners are frustratingly ignorant about astronomy in general (guilty) but "here is how to put all your new equipment together, what all the parts are called, and how to use the handy app to move it around" sure would have flattened my learning curve. 
--
Robert Scott Parks - Northwest Arkansas, USA

Mount: Explore Scientific EXOS II GT WITH PMC-8
Polar Finder: EXOS II integrated with illuminated reticle
Telescope: Explore Scientific 127mm f/7.5 FCD1 Air-Spaced Triplet ED APO Refractor
Finder: Telrad
Hardware: Samsung Galaxy Tab A 7", Dell Venue 10 Pro 32bit OS, Samsung Galaxy S20+
Steering Software: ExploreStars App, ASCOM/POTH + StellariumScope/Stellarium + Wifi Scope + SkySafari Pro

Good Morning,

I wanted to share my excitement to have everything working together, with the great assistance from you all here.

Using my EXOSII-PMC8 mount with my Starwave 80ED scope, I was able to capture a great image of the Ring nebula, M57.
My workflow is as follows,

1. Polar Align using Sharpcap (over serial)
2. Power up PMC8
3. Start the PMC configuration tool and set connection to serial, connect.
4. Start the POTH hub (For slewing scope on first star for focus)
5. Start Stellarium and connect to POTH ascom
6. Focus and align sync on bright star

This works great, and was most enjoyable last night.
Thanks to all suggestions and valuable information found in these forums!

cheers,

--
Rob
Kitchener, Ontario
EXOSII-PMC8 Mount
Starwave 80ED
Starfield 50mm/ZWO ASI Guide Scope
Altair 224c
Meade ETX80

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 08:27 PM, darrell burke wrote:

One more rant - and this may be me being thick - but why aren't the stars in some sort of order? Alphabetical, by constellation ... something. And if they actually are - please send me the magic decoder ring ... or put it in a manual!

There is a search tool. Just look for the star you are trying to find.
 
--
Jerry Hubbell
Vice President of Engineering
Explore Scientific, LLC.
jrh at explorescientific.com
www.explorescientificusa.com
1010 S. 48th Street
Springdale, AR 72762
1-866-252-3811

Author: Scientific Astrophotography: How Amateurs Can Generate and Use Professional Imaging Data
             Remote Observatories for Amateur Astronomers: Using High-Powered Telescopes From Home


Mark Slade Remote Observatory (MSRO) IAU MPC W54 Equipment
Wilderness, VA
Mounts: ES PMC-Eight G11 + Telescope Drive Master (TDM)
Scopes: ES 165 FPL-53 ED APO CF, ES 102 FCD100 ED APO CF
Cameras:  QHY174M-GPS + FW, QHY163C
Misc: 3-inch 0.7x Focal Reducer Field Flattener, Filters: Luminance,
Red, V-band Photometric, Diffuser, 200 lpmm Spectral Grating
Software: MaxIm DL 6, Cartes du Ciel, Astrometrica, AstroImageJ, AutoStakkert!

God bless you Brian!

And now the rant [not at you]
This is my first Goto ... for years I've flailed around with my telrad with rare moments of being able to find anything other than dead simple stuff.

I was so exited ... but oh my God its been so difficult to figure this all out. Far more it seems to me than it needs to be. The instructions are not even close to being detailed enough.
 
So naturally one goes to google & youtube. I watch the nice detailed video about the controls from a few years ago and the try and use my Android device and find out its different. But hey it can't be that different right?

So there I am aligning pressing sync - aligning pressing sync and absolutely devastated at how terrible this thing is at finding anything! This evening I'm rooting around and finally I stumble on the one post where "Enter" vs "Sync" is described ... then your excellent post that show me how to actually choose my stars rather than endlessly press next, next, next.

My main rant is why Explorestars doesn't have manual for Android.? And if you do I apologize  ... but if it exists it seems to buried deep in the dark web. Simple stuff - like "here what all the buttons do" I don't mind work and learning, but even in school they gave you a text book with a section on how to dissect a frog - then the frog and the scalpel. With this you get the frog and the scalpel. ... then you just ask around the school about how best to proceed.

 

One more rant - and this may be me being thick - but why aren't the stars in some sort of order? Alphabetical, by constellation ... something. And if they actually are - please send me the magic decoder ring ... or put it in a manual!

 

Rant concluded ... now I'm going to search for what the hell debug mode is - don't tell me! It will spoil all the 'fun' of endless searching.

Hi Guys,

Just a quick hour on the Dumbbel Nebula last night
Mount and software still all playing together nicely now :)


--
Scopes: Sky Watcher 200PDS, Skywatcher 72ED
Mount: Explore Scientific PMC8 EXO2
Cameras: ASI 294MCPRO Coooled, Altair guide cam + 50mm scope
Software: Sharpcap Pro ,PH2, Stelarium Startools

Wes,
I was able to:
Set the rate fraction to in in the RA sidereal rate fraction on the ascom driver for the mount.
Set calibration distance to .50 on the phd2 option  (.50 like period 50 not 50, I hope that is it)

I was able to do the day time test using the phd2 manual guide, I could not figure this one out "Set your guide rate in the ascom driver to 1" but I up the minimum pulse time to max, it read 500 on the ascom driver.

This are my result and observation, first I center the guide scope and ota to a street STOP somewhat far away.  When I was doing the pulse rate, I set it to 5000ms in phd2, I notice the STOP sign moving in my live view but at first it looked like when I did West, and East it move to the same side. I am not sure what you mean here " In RA the moment you stop guiding the mount will resume moving in RA in the opposite direction" I am not sure I saw this behavior?
Since the movement of the STOP sign was not like I expected, specially with going north, south.  after equal pulses of 5 seconds, the STOP sign just moved from my live view but I never came back to see the STOP sign as when I first set it.  I use the RA, DEC on the poth scope and this is the results.

I did 5 pulses for a total 25 seconds for each direction N,S,W,E
move North RA 15:20:57   -> 15:20:57  
                   DEC: 89:58:59 -> 89:56:29
Move South  RA 15:20:57  -> 15:20:57
                     DEC 89:56:29 -> 89:59:10
Move West  RA 15:20:57 -> 15:20:46
                    DEC 89:59:10 -> 89:59:10
Move East  RA 15:20:47 -> 15:20:57
                   DEC 89:59:10 -> 89:59:10
        
I was not able to do the calibration close to meridian or do the cross test as the sky did not collaborate.

Please let me know so far, what you see on the result of the live view test, to me it moved accordingly but the picture never came back to how I started.
I was not expecting that, the STOP sign ended up above to the right on the live view.

Thank you!!


--
Edwin Sanchez
Iexos-100
ed-80 triplet
canon T6i

--
Wes, Southport NC
PMC-8, ES ED 127, 10" LX200GPS, Astro-Tech 8" Newt, ETX-90
Polemaster, Orion ST-80 and SAG
Electrical Engineer, Retired

Wes,
forgot this one, I change to 50 for calibration distance

--
Edwin Sanchez
Iexos-100
ed-80 triplet
canon T6i

Wes,
you said to pit tue guide rate to 1 in the ascom driver, I did it here and set it to 1000, hope thats it

Maximum Pulse time - 1000 ???

--
Edwin Sanchez
Iexos-100
ed-80 triplet
canon T6i

--
Wes, Southport NC
PMC-8, ES ED 127, 10" LX200GPS, Astro-Tech 8" Newt, ETX-90
Polemaster, Orion ST-80 and SAG
Electrical Engineer, Retired

Is there a way to change the order of the messier objects that are displayed in the ExploreStars catalog? I was thinking of being able to sort the objects by RA.
--
Scopes - Celestron Comet Catcher, Celestron C8, AR 127 Air-Spaced Doublet
Mount - EXOS-2GT

Wes,
thank you much!!
i will follow your suggestion today and tonight as I think I will catch a clear night for a change.

i will report back with results to see you feedback, I knew if I added this guiding to my setup, it was going to take time, as Kent (cool guy from ES) always tells me, this is a journey! 

have a nice Sunday!

--
Edwin Sanchez
Iexos-100
ed-80 triplet
canon T6i

--
Wes, Southport NC
PMC-8, ES ED 127, 10" LX200GPS, Astro-Tech 8" Newt, ETX-90
Polemaster, Orion ST-80 and SAG
Electrical Engineer, Retired

So, the two counterweights including with the exos100 are a bit much for my Nikon D500 with a 35mm prime lens. They work fine when I have my Sigma 600mm attached. With a little creativity, I took the mount off the rings on my 4 inch ES scope and taped a C batter to it and then to the shaft. Just wanted to share the redneck ingenuity here. LOL

I got this picture from the log File of pdh2,
does this tell you guys anything that Might be not set correctly?

--
Edwin Sanchez
Iexos-100
ed-80 triplet
canon T6i

Wes,

Ok, so we're trying stuff.  The rationale on the parameter change I mentioned came from a single post on a phd2 forum.  The usual response to the "did not move enough" complaint is that it's the mount hardware's fault and the software's fine.  This particular post went farther, and outlined that for the OP's (insert other mfr's name) mount, there was enough mechanical backlash that the mount simply had to move father in order to calibrate well.  IIRC, increasing Calibration Distance solved it for the OP, and it did work the one time I was able to test it. 

FWIW...

--

--
Wes, Southport NC
PMC-8, ES ED 127, 10" LX200GPS, Astro-Tech 8" Newt, ETX-90
Polemaster, Orion ST-80 and SAG
Electrical Engineer, Retired

Bob,
makes me feel better that guiding can be accomplished using the little guy iexos-100.

i will  check the logs from last night to see if I find anything there that catches my eye and share.

thank you!


--
Edwin Sanchez
Iexos-100
ed-80 triplet
canon T6i

--

Hi all!
i am having the following error and I am really hoping someone can give me some pointers in troubleshooting the below error I am having with phd2
1. When I do calibration - i did this by Vega it was high I did not get the 20 degree warning, 
2. I am poth hub connected thru serial, after many days of trying to connect mount (special thank you to Chris Moses!!)
3. I have the mount iexos-100 mounted on a heavy duty tripod because my total load is about 22lb
so when calibrating I get
RA CALIBRATION FAILED BECAUSE STAR DID NOT MOVE ENOUGH.

after turning off pdh2, I just let it pick a guide star and start guiding after 30 seconds I get this error

PHD2 cannot make sufficient corrections in RA
 
i get this over and over, i do the manual pulses for 5 seconds, no problem, I have used the guide assistant and done whatever it has suggested

I wonder if iexos-100 is just not the mount for my equipment??

does anybody successfully guide with a telescope on this mount?

i have seen Jerry give troubleshooting videos but nothing like this errors.

if anyone can help with pointer so that I either move on to a different mount or just stick to using dslr on this mount just like a star tracker??

thank you!!!!!!!

———————--
Edwin Sanchez
IEXOS -100
ED-80 Triplet
Canon 6Ti
SVBONY 60mm guide
AZO ASI 120Mini