GEAR · IN USE

AZ-GTe goto mount

Tracking alt-az goto. Residual drift measured at ~3 px/s on 11/09/2026 against 17 px/s undriven.

Brendan, Goolwa SA

Acquired: 2026-09
Type: alt-az, goto
Drive: tracking
Drift: ~3 px/s residual at 1300 mm
Control: SynScan app

Confirm model and app — written from the first night's data, not the manual.

First measured on Venus: 23 px of drift in 7 s at 0.222"/px, so about 0.7"/s. That is the difference between a 7-second drift-through run and a fifteen-minute one. Run length is no longer set by the mount.

The goto database does not list Alpha Centauri under that name. It is Rigil Kentaurus in the named-star list. Acrux and Fomalhaut are there as-is.

Do not connect the INDI driver to it as a test. Last time that was tried the mount slewed on connect.

Used on these nights

SESSION 13 · 09/26 · WORKED

The whole Moon, and a search that found Saturn

A complete Moon at last - 24 panels, 100% of the sunlit disc, measured and not just looked at - and my first Saturn, rings and all, in a single overexposed frame. On the way: a spiral search built…

SESSION 12 · 09/26 · PARTLY WORKED

Still not a complete Moon, and I said it was

Best image yet and still 11.8% of the sunlit disc missing. Three launches, a plate scale that had been 15% wrong all along, and a centring error of 8'.

SESSION 11 · 09/26 · WORKED

A mount that answered every question and refused to move

The best sky in weeks, and two hours lost to a mount that talked happily and would not turn. Saturn is a fortnight from opposition.

SESSION 10 · 09/26 · PARTLY WORKED

The only thing that worked was the thing I came to test

I went out in a gale to do one job: make the mount keep following the Moon while a panel is being exposed. That job is done, measured, and finished. Almost everything else about the evening went…

SESSION 9 · 09/26 · PARTLY WORKED

Every goto was perfect and the picture still didn't line up

The night I found out the mosaic was never going to work the way it was built. Every goto landed within an arcsecond — seventy-two panels across two grids — and the tiles still did not line up…

SESSION 8 · 09/26 · WORKED

The mount moved on its own, forty-eight times, and every one of them was where I sent it

The night the laptop drove the telescope. INDI could connect but never finish a goto, so the mount went on raw motor-controller commands instead: a 0.05 degree test that landed to one arcsecond…

SESSION 7 · 09/26 · WORKED

Five metres of cable, an altitude limit, and an eyepiece where the camera should have been

Four and a half hours between first question and first frame, almost none of it spent on the sky. A new five-metre USB cable that would not enumerate, an altitude limit I had set and forgotten, a…

SESSION 6 · 09/26 · WORKED

Eight degrees of compass, a cloud of mosquitoes, and Venus in the last twenty minutes

Lost the first hour and a half to a pointing error I have been guessing at since 30 August and finally measured: 7.4 degrees of azimuth, which is Goolwa's magnetic declination. Two false trails, a…

SESSION 5 · 09/26 · WORKED

A real crescent, a rainbow I didn't ask for, and an argument about focus

First proper Venus: a 31% crescent, 35 arcseconds across, lit side to the horizon. Confirmed the image scale off the disc, measured the dispersion, and then argued with the numbers about whether it…