Hi Group,
I’ve been using my CGE Pro for close to a year, except for those times it’s been back to Celestron. It’s performed well and I’ve been happy with it.
Now I have a major problem with the DEC axis. As the title says, the DEC has decided to run wild after behaving properly at first. When the DEC drive goes, it rotates one or two revolutions until it runs out of USB cables and hangs up. This has happened each of the last two nights’ sessions.
So far each morning I have been able to untangle and restart the mount, so far.
I’ve opened a ticket with Celestron, and don’t think this is an SGPro issue. However, if anyone has seen this behavior I would welcome their thoughts.
Here’s the summary along with a Dropbox link.
The mount was purchased in January of 2017. It has been back to Celestron twice for drive/control problems. It has worked well since receiving it back after the second repair.
Until Dec 9th the mount had run properly. This included IC417 on Nov 27th and 29th, along with NGC772 on Nov 24th and Dec 8th.
On the morning of Dec 10th I found the mount tangled up in the equipment’s power and control cables. The mount was bound up and still struggling against the cables. The night before (Dec 9th) the target had been IC417 and ten (10) subs had successfully run from about 10:50pm to 12:45am. At that point the mount should have done a pier flip but did not. And sometime after that, the DEC drive rotated twice around its spindle and became bound in its cables.
I disengaged all the cables, replaced the filter wheel USB cable which had been badly damaged, and was able to get the mount back to a working condition. I fully expected to see a failure message in the handset, but all started up OK.
I suspected that the failed pier flip may have been a contributor to the problem, although the logs might have provided more answers than my skill level provides.
I set up the system for the following night (Dec 10th) and again targeted IC417. I checked on the system’s behavior at hourly intervals and planned to be present at 12:48am when SGPro planned pier flip would occur. Unfortunately, the DEC wrap-around failure happened at around 10:43pm (I think). This was long before the scheduled flip.
The failure was similar to that of Dec 9th. The DEC drive had rotated in the CCW direction about one full revolution before becoming bound in the hardware’s cables. I noticed this time SGPro stated it was attempting to Park the mount. Not sure what was stated from the prior session.
This morning I again untangled the cables and started up the mount. It started just fine and appeared to be happy. But I won’t be trying for that third time before I find a fix.