Hi all:

I'm a new guy here. I retired about three years ago after 15 years with Motorola communications as an FCC licensed radio service engineer and 27 years as an x-ray machine repairman at a hospital. I just got my Argo Navis a few weeks ago. A little background, about nine years ago I got an opportunity to buy a 16 inch wooden, homemade telescope a guy had built, and as you might expect was not able to get it to work very well. I took out the mirrors and the focuser and threw the rest away. Sent the mirror off to be recoated and used it to build a telescope from scratch. The mount in the attached picture is a 1974 cave mount. For most of the last seven years I have struggled with pointing accuracy. Nothing I could do would make this thing consistently put things in the field. After six years of trying absolutely everything else, I finally decided I might need some better digital setting circles. I posted an inquiry to four manufacturers. I am not normally a lucky person, but I was fortunate that the only intelligent response I got was from Gary at wildcard innovations. He figured out immediately that I probably had orthogonality problems and informed me that his computer can handle that problem. Talk about lucky.

Please forgive me if I don't get terminology correct. I am very new to the Argo Navis. What has to be done to correct my problem is to create a star map of the entire sky so the computer can compensate for manufacturing deficiencies in my mount. Gary told me to start with 25 stars. I retained the services of an experienced astronomer to help me identify stars, and we performed the 25 star mapping procedure. This brings me to the subject of my post.

The procedure in the manual, well, it just seems a little too wordy and complicated. They spend a lot of time explaining why you are doing things instead of just telling you what to do, and we would just keep losing our place. They would tell you to do something, write three paragraphs explaining why, and then leave you wondering where exactly you left off in the procedure. Curious if anyone else has had this experience and possibly wrote a simplified procedure for doing this.

One other question: Gary told me that, despite having done all of this mapping, that I would have to map four or five stars every night before I start my observing run. I'm afraid I will eventually misidentify one and introduce an error into my hard-earned star map. I am on a permanent mount very accurately polar aligned. I was hoping, having created this elaborate star map, that I would just have to do a one star or a two star alignment and be off and running.

I am in central Missouri, and you don't get many good nights this time of year, unless you are a penguin. Tonight looks pretty good and we are going to go out and work with it a little.

Sorry this is so long. I tried doing a search, but this is just not the sort of thing I am good at and I didn't come up with anything.

Best regards

Mike