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SW alignment star selection


Clive

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My observing location suffers from local obstructions (houses, trees etc.) to such an extent that when trying to align my SW mount, on many occasions one or more of the chosen alignments stars are hidden behind on of the many obstructions.  This has resulted in repeated attempts to achieve alignment and the time taken could have been better spent actually observing.  In an attempt to avoid this situation, I’ve developed an Excel spread sheet.  The local horizon is entered by the user into the spread sheet using a few selected points and it’s simply creates a list and plots a star map of all the possible Synscan controller alignment stars (and any other objects added by the user) that are actually visible above the local horizon at any particular date and time.  It just saves time over entering the selected alignment star names into a sky-map software package and estimating whether they are actually visible or not and can be used in advance of the observing session to select 3 alignment stars that will be visible.

 

The following is a screenshot of one of the sheets.

 

large.Screenshot.jpg.85d5c0d036580eda7c67f16edcd1ea15.jpg

 

The spread sheet and a ‘user guide’ can be downloaded from:

 

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ai8Fm1S8maX_gmZWjhpV9ePWopMO?e=ngLfqr

 

I’ve found that after downloading it, when the spread sheet is first opened, the following error message appears.  Simply click END and the spread sheet will then operate as intended and will continue to do so afterwards.

 

large.Error.jpg.21ea2afa47f32a0cf4ff16ca8679a274.jpg

 

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The spread sheet has now been updated to version 1.1.0 to cope with the various possible macro settings selectable within Excel (which was the cause of the error message shown in the original post when the spread sheet was opened for the first time).  The 'User Guide' has also been updated to explain the macro settings and the first use of the spread sheet in a bit more detail.  The updates can be downloaded from the original location https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ai8Fm1S8maX_gmZWjhpV9ePWopMO?e=ngLfqr.

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