Last night I PEC trained the Celestron Nexstar 11 GPS (wedge mounted altazimuth) mount for the first time. The Celestron software made a 5-average learning run very easy to carry out. Since a worm-gear rotation is around 8-minutes this exercise took around 40-minutes to complete. I did a bit of imaging before the clouds rolled in with the PEC program running, and to be honest I couldn’t see much of an improvement in the tracking. I think that if you’re lucky enough that you don’t have any violent PEC excurions so that those you do have are smooth – then the autoguider can handle these o.k.
I’ve also added a 3mm thick Aluminium stiffener plate to the supplied Robofocus motor mount. The motor is now rock-solid to the telescope so any backlash will be due to the scope’s rack and pinion and not the way the motor is mounted. I will post pictures of the mounting arrangement once I’ve sorted out autofocusing. Right now all I have done is set the motor focus drive limits so that the system is calibrated and ready to go when I next see some clear sky.
