At 10:08 2003-08-22 +0000, Lawrence wrote:

>A couple of nights back I did some imaging with my CCD and, as usual,
>Guide controlling the LX200. I came across NGC6992. It is a large area
>of nebulosity and stars. I decided to try a mosaic. After my first
>image of the top left, I moved a little to the west. I completely lost
>track of where I was, so had to return to the starting place. After
>spending a long time trying to match the left and right edges of the
>field for the second shot, I gave up.
>
>If only Guide could have a simple hot key or other method of moving RA
>or dec by a specific amount. If only......

Hi Lawrence.

I think there is a way to set up Guide to match your system. Try the
following.

Go to a level that shows your CCD box covering about half of the screen.

Now use your left/right, up/down arrows to move the CCD box on the screen.
Guide will re center the box on the map and you can see that the CCD box
has moved about a box width, more or less. Now go to the settings menu and
select the "level size" tab. Not the level tab! This will allow you to
change the star map scale of that selected level. You should be able to
adjust the scale to let you move the CCD box just the right amount to move
over to the next image location. Then type the (F11) key and the telescope
should center on the new CCD box location. I would suggest a bit of
overlap for each image as in my experience my LX200 has some slop in the
movement. Once you get the correct movement set save that setup as a new
mark(mrk) file that you could invoke each time you want to take a mosaic
series. My CCD chip is square which simplifies things a bit but you could
make two mark files to solve that problem. Bill may have some better
suggestions.

Best regards,

Bob Elliott