Help Compustar 14"

On Sunday, January 27, 2002 2:00:06 AM UTC-6, Wilfried Noell & Sandra Kelly-Noell wrote:
Hello,

Our Astronomy Club has a nice Compustar 14, but unfortunately this scope
has a nasty Y2k bug and some other deficiencies. If anybod could help us
with issues below, it would be highly appreciated.

Intro:
------

It took some time for us (the club) lately to find some time to work on
our
Compustar 14 (CS14). F.y.i.: The OTA is mounted in a fork on a wedge and
the
whole thing on a concrete base/pillar in a nice Baader-Planetarium dome.
Unfortunately, the wealthy times of that installation are over and the
club
is struggling financially, the heavens now why.


Running the Scope:
-------------------------

One note beforehand. Most of the people in the club are relatively old
and
did not really bother with the computer and control unit of the CS14.
The
telescope was used mainly manually, especially after the Y2k thing came
up.

Lately a few people (like me) decided to run the whole thing via a
notebook.
So we got a notebook and TheSky V5/L2 (Unfortunately, the ONLY program
that
seems to provide a driver for this telelescope).

Now the problems started: We wanted to go through the begin procedure of
the
CS14 and noticed the telescope is not aligned anymore to Polaris at all.
At -10°C we started to fiddle around with that heavy thing using the
"Polaris method" (explained on Robert Gibala's homepage) and after a
couple of ours
and a few almost frozen fingers, we thought the alignment is OK. The OTA
is
really heavy!

OK, we went through the begin procedure again and noticed the reference
star
is not reached at all. We are about 10° north (it was Aldebaran). The
time
had been entered in UT and all the settings were OK - we double checked
on
that. So we slewed to Aldebaran, confirmed the position and went via the
computer unit to a couple more stars and synchronized every time. But
still
the CS14 could not find the location of the desired objects. It was
always
pointing a few degrees off.

Has anybody any idea how to fix this without investing hundreds of
thousands
of $$$? As I said the club is not so wealthy these days.


The collimation:
--------------------

Another thing: It seems to be very difficult to collimate the optics.
There
are only three very small screws that can only be turned with a
screw-driver
(no thumb screws). Very very little movement has an enormous effect.
After
half a turn or so, they seem to be loose and do not seem to have anymore
effect. Is that normal?



TheSky:
----------

Recently we purchased TheSky V5.0.010/Level2 and I also saw there is an
update available on the bisque ftp server to upgrade to V5.0.016. I
soldered
a cable (Thanks to the pin lay-out from Robert Gibala's homepage -
THANKS!) and the
communication between the notebook and the CS14 seems to work. I enter
an
object and the telescopes slews approximately to the location of the
object
(a few degrees off, like I said before). But TheSky is still thinking
the
CS14, i.e. the crosshair, is somewhere else. I have to go through the
whole
telescope submenus to "update coordinates" to tell TheSky the CS14 is
somewhere else. Isn't there a shortcut for that, or do I have to go
every
time through this whole procedure with the menu?


HELP:
=====

If anybody can help us with any of the points mentioned above, it is
highly
appreciated!


BTW, Celestron does not feel to help any Compustar users. They simply
deny support and come up with lame excuses. They do not even offer a new
Y2K-debugged control unit, which a lot of people would gladly buy.

Thank you all in advance and for reading all the way to this point!



Best regards and CLEAR SKIES!
Wilfried Noell

I know this is an old post but for others that run into this problem,
Starchron Solutions sells a Y2K upgrade for the compustars.
Tom Sorbel is the guy responsible for this. it works fine.