TheSkySearchers

Hello to all.
Hope this is the proper forum.

I'm not a newbie to astronomy but am new to GOTO computerized tracking.
Not interested in astro-photography; been there done that years ago, from film to cold cameras to gas hypered.

My 8" LX 90, (just bought last week) is set up for alt/az alignment.
First night out was a piece of cake, it worked as it should; no problems finding two alignment stars and it tracked well and was able to GOTO several objects.

Now, three nights later; it's acting up:

1) After GPS fix, it's looking to align on stars that are not even out this time of year for me.
It appears to be slewing well, no slippage.

I looked deeper into the menus; it indicates my city as location, so I believe the GPS is getting a good fix on time & date.

I understand "Training the drive" only improves tracking accuracy.
Hard to believe it worked so well the first evening or two and then be so far out of alignment in selecting guide stars for alignment.

The only change I made was to remove the 8 C cells and now use a 12V battery to power the scope.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Have you tried a "factory reset" and then start from scratch making sure all your local data is correct.

Cheers,
JT

JayTee wrote: ↑Fri Sep 27, 2019 11:30 pm Have you tried a "factory reset" and then start from scratch making sure all your local data is correct.

Cheers,
JT

Thanks JayTee,

Yes, I sure did..date & time + location all seem good.

A Meade tech called me this evening. We ran thru some simple tests. Everything seemed OK to him.
His only recommendation was to train the drive, which I will do tomorrow evening weather permitting.
Not sure how the drive could be so far off in just 3 days?

Other than that, very satisfied with the scope...Kinda' took the fun out of my days when I had to actually learn the celestial coordinate system,
sidereal time and setting circles.

Well; I've done all I can do.
Scoured all the forums I could find in relation to this.
Even Meade was nice enough to have a tech call me; he had me run some basic tests; still no joy.
Calibrated motors, trained the scope..all to no avail.
My best guess is that something in the Hbx went bad.

Meade has a 30 day no questions asked return policy which I will take advantage of.
Will have another shipped and see what happens.

Blackbelt760 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 29, 2019 6:39 pm Well; I've done all I can do.
Scoured all the forums I could find in relation to this.
Even Meade was nice enough to have a tech call me; he had me run some basic tests; still no joy.
Calibrated motors, trained the scope..all to no avail.
My best guess is that something in the Hbx went bad.

Meade has a 30 day no questions asked return policy which I will take advantage of.
Will have another shipped and see what happens.

Any news on the replacement scope? I bought a 8" LX90ACF more than a year ago and could not get the goto to be accurate from day one, after a lot of experimenting and testing and with help on forums like this, we pinpointed the problem to the wrong gears that were fitted to both the Az and Dec drives : 156 instead of 154 tooth. When I got in touch the the right people my scope was replaced within a week and I got to keep the first one which is working perfectly when you change the gear ratio to work with 156 tooth gears. It is now my #2 scope that I use for outreach activity. I hope that you will also have a happy story at the end....

my "If all fails" list for the meade LX90ACF :
1) Install patched firmware : this can be downloaded from https://www.stargps.ca/downloads.htm It does remove a lot of bugs from the firmware.
2) Do a Reset.
3) Do "Calibrate Motor"
4) Train both Az and Alt drives.