How to sync SGP by visually centering 3 stars in telescope eyepiece without plate solving?

Sequence Generator
1

I would like to sync my mount manually by slewing my telescope to 3 stars in succession and pressing a “sync” button in SGP each time I’ve centered a star in the telescope’s eyepiece. I’m not interested in plate solving, I just want to sync the telescope so that when I slew to a target’s RA and DEC coordinates the target is almost perfectly centered in my image. Is there such a “sync” button in SGP?

Thanks,
Pete

2

Pete,
To do that in SGP you’d need to enter the RA and Dec very precisely where you want to sync (what a plate solver does). I would think this would be very difficult and tedious from an end user perspective.

I would recommend you either go the plate solve route or do the 3 star alignment with your mount hardware. Even with the hand controller you can manually center the star and sync using the hand controller. Unfortunately the 3 star alignment is done entirely in the hand controller and SGP doesn’t know it’s going on and has no way of knowing where the mount is trying to go.

Thanks,
Jared

3

I think what you’re really asking about is building a mount model. That’s
not really something SGP is designed to do and I don’t think that there is
a sync option like what you are asking. I might suggest centering the star
in SGP and then using the mount’s controller to sync on that star.

However, plate solve and sync does what you want to do, I think. It may
depend on your mount. Just sayin’.

4

Thanks Jared and Joel, I just watched your video on plate solving and the process looks easier than I had thought so I’ll use that method instead.

All the best!
Pete