Digital setting circles (Tom Gray)

Contains: Gear

Digital setting circles

Those of a certain vintage will remember DSCs - Digital Setting Circles. These revolutionised pointing for those using old mounts. Early DSCs were not much more accurate than brass setting circles, but with the advent of high resolution encoders and handheld computers ‘push to’ was realised.

No more guessing, squinting through my tiny red dot finder, star hopping with an inverted view, and importantly ‘time wasted’ looking for objects... dialling in an object from the database, or connecting via planetarium software, provides directions to ‘push to’ the object, with a good degree of accuracy.

After a three month wait, due to the pandemic and recent bad weather in Texas, my new CUI AMT 10 encoders arrived - a bargain at £36 GBP for the pair. These were easily wired up and with a little help from Gary Kopff (MD Wildcard Innovations) I am able to connect these directly to my existing Argo Navis unit and access any of the >29,000 objects stored in the database. The encoders are 2048 quadrature capacitive optical encoders giving a resolution of 8192 steps = 2.6 arc minutes per step.

I’ve mounted these to the Az and Alt bearings (under a cover made from a plastic bottle top), and wired into a dual RJ11 telephone port, which interfaces with the Argo encoder cable.

I’m looking forward to testing these under the next clear sky, and hopefully maximising my imaging and viewing time.

Low-Cost Astrophotography
Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) Imagers
Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams
UK Astro-Imaging

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

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Digital setting circles

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