Hi All! This is my first post here in the forum so don’t laugh too hard.
I have a 16" Lightbridge scope with a Servocat and Argo Navis installed and it uses Servocat’s ASCOM drivers. My question is How do you all connect SGP to Servocat? I presently have most USB devices going to a USB 3.0 hub. ZWO’s camera drivers wouldn’t play nice with something so I had to run a direct USB line straight to the laptop which resolved the issue. But, I never got the Servocat to heed SGP’s commands to move. I have Plate Solving set up and have successfully solved but, the scope doesn’t move. Am I missing something? Is there anything I can try? How do you all do it?
Thank you for your reply.
No, I haven’t used any other program for pointing. SGP is the first. Forgive me for not adding to my initial post that I am fairly new to this and so far I really like what SGP has to offer. So this program would be the first to move this mount via ASCOM. Fine movements by ST4 is no problem using PHD2.
Now, may I turn your question into a suggestion by try one of those programs you mentioned to see if ASCOM even works? Which would you recommend for ease of setup and what we are trying to do?
Sam - ST4 is entirely different and moving the mount using a physical electrical input. I would strongly suggest finding a planetarium program. The three I mentioned are all free. All three are popular. Cartes du Ciel is very well known, I personally prefer the similar C2A but some others like Stellarium as it is more graphical. They all can connect to a mount through ASCOM. With this, you should be able to point to an area of sky on the screen and tell the mount to move there. This is really useful and a good first step.
Once that is working, and SGP is not, then things become more challenging, as both programs would be sending the same commands through the ASCOM interface (move there, stop, tracking on, park, tracking off etc)
I will do that and reply to the forum for next steps if any. This may take a day or two as we have been bombarded by daily rain storms. So, the next time I get out I’ll get this done.
Hi Buzz. Apologies for taking so long to get back to you but life happens.
I have been out once since we last spoke and I could not get servocat to move once under CA2 and moved once using SGP. Even though it moved only once, I feel, is progress. I think the issue I am having is servocat related and has nothing to do with SGP. Ill keep working with it and thank you for your help!
It may be that you need to be fully set up and tracking. The Celestron GOTO controller won’t respond to ASCOM commands if the controller is still in setup mode and it has to be tracking before it will respond to any external command.