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Ultima 2000 Compustar Magellan I Also, controls over encoder resolution will be provided. These are required only for alignment of JMI/MG-III (Tangent Instrument) compatible systems, and will be discussed in the next chapter. A description of the hardware end of connecting a computer to the LX-200 is given on page 87 of the LX-200 instruction manual. You should determine to which COM port the LX-200 is attached, and pick the corresponding menu item in the LX-200 menu. If you don't know which port is used, it's okay to guess. The worst that will happen is that, when you try to control the scope, Guide will pause for about fifteen seconds, then report its failure. Guide enters the picture when you are ready to find or identify objects. Once you have used the Telescope dialog to tell Guide what sort of telescope you have and which serial port it uses, a "Scope Pad" item will be added to the main menu. Clicking on "Scope Pad" toggles display of a little floating dialog box, loosely modelled on the LX-200 control pad. The next step is alignment. For this purpose, systems fall into two categories: the JMI/MG-III encoder-based systems, and everything else. "JMI/MG-III" is used as a shorthand to refer to a huge range of devices: the JMI NGC-Max series, the MicroGuider III, Ouranos, Lumicon, Advanced AstroMaster, Orion Sky Wizard, B-Box, and a few others. Despite the variety of labels, all of these are actually made by Tangent Instruments, and are also referred to as "Tangent Instrument boxes." JMI/MG-III type systems are also called "dumb boxes", because all they return to the PC is the position of the encoders. The PC is expected to provide the "brains" needed to convert encoder readouts to RA/dec data. All the other devices, such as the LX-200 and Ultima 2000, have built-in alignment systems. Once you have aligned them (typically by pointing them at one or more known reference stars), Guide is ready to communicate with them. But for JMI/MG-III type systems, the alignment has to be done using Guide. The process is described in the next chapter. As with the LX-200 control pad, the Scope Pad provides four buttons to allow motion north, south, east, and west, plus a central "stop moving" button; and there are four rates of motion provided. (Obviously, none of these work with encoder-based systems. Such systems don't have motors with which to move the telescope.) There are some additional buttons below these that are specific to
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