Interesting things about the MCU Update
As I dig deeper and deeper into the MCU update from Rajiva while writing some control software for it; I'm finding out that his work is a veritable 'tour-de-force' when it comes to telescope control. He's left little out.

Interesting items
  1. The mount keeps track of it's RA and declination at all times when powered on. All you have to do is be careful with your polar alignment and all you need to do is a single-star 'alignment' on the mount to set the scope's position. This is a simple as centreing a known star and then telling the scope what it's position is. The scope does the rest.
  2. You don't have to be in 'goto' mode to do a goto. With suitable software you can use 'digital setting circles' to read the scope's position and use the standard guiding interface watching the circles.
  3. The PEC recorder stores 256 points in the 360 degree rotation of the worm. You can then download the PEC table from the mount and adjust it manually if you see any spurious entries. This is a great feature which allows you to fine-tune your PEC table.
  4. The electronics do something Rajiva calls 'IntellyTrack' which will allow accurate tracking even with a poor polar alignment or even alt-az.
  5. With a small modification to the Rajiva updated hand controller you can control a powered focuser from the handbox, or from a computer.
  6. If you don't use 'star hopping' with a finder-scope or use a coarse finder like a Telrad, when you're near where you want to be you can tell the scope to do a 'Find' which starts a square search. The first go-round is at 4x speed and the next are at 8x speed.
  7. When the Synta 'grease' is removed, the scope balances much nicer allowing 40x speed for slews. I set mine for 2x for guiding, 16x for centreing and 40x for slewing versus the 2/8/16 that is available stock. It works well.

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