I believe you will find that Eastern Standard time is +5 and Eastern
Daylight is +4. Avi has it correct.

-----Original Message-----
William R Wood
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2001 12:10 PM
Subject: [M]: RE: LX200 GOTO Problems part II!

Adi
I just got my LX200 and have no problems getting objects in the FOV of a
26mm EP using a casual 2 star AltAz alignment. From your post it looks like
you will be fine if you redo your basic settings. The Meade manual says get
your Lat/Long numbers within 1 or 2 minutes. You can get these values
exactly off any of the many Lat/Long sites listed on MAPUG website. I used
Geocode.com and it works perfectly. Then the manual says put in your local
time to within 5 seconds using any of the many atomic clock sites on the
web. I use SyncitwithAtom avail from Tolvanen.com which is a utility that
automatically syncronizes your computer clock to the atomic clock and keeps
it set perfectly to well under a second at all times. Then set your GMT
offset correctly. I dont know where you live but if you are in the US
Eastern time zone the correct offset now is +3 since its daylight savings
time. Your post says you used +4 which is incorrect. Finally make sure you
have the correct date entered.

I believe these basics will get your results where you want them using a
casual 2 star alignment. Note that this sort of casual alignment will give
you pointing accuracy to within a few arc minutes. If you want better
accuracy to a tolerance of 2 arc minutes, do a critical alignment as per the
instructions on page 19 of the Meade manual which essentially consists of
using a reticle EP to exactly center the alignment stars in addition to
using exact position, time and date info. According to the manual you can
even get 1 minute pointing accuracy using High Precision mode but this
certainly is not necessary for visual use.

Good luck

Bill Wood



-----Original Message-----
Aditya Damodaran
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2001 11:05 PM
Subject: [M]: LX200 GOTO Problems part II!


Hi,
I'm really jealous of all the people getting great Goto accuracy on their
new scopes! I for one am still struggling. I tried again today with a GMT
offset of +4 for EDT and put in my location correctly too and the only
thing that I wasnt extremely accurate about was the time which i suspect
was plus or minus 5 minutes. I did the two star alignment on Deneb and
Spica and noticed that even so, it still couldnt center Polaris altho it
came close. However with time the errors grew larger and larger and I just
dont understand it. Objects close to the alignment stars are in the FOV if
I do a GOTO but Objects which are slightly far away from Both alignment
stars arent even in the FOV and need some adjustment to get them there
usually in RA. I am using a plain jane 10" scope with the standard
eyepiece (SP25mm). Please advise. Newbie in distress!
Thanks,
Adi

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