Weasner's Meade Autostar Suite User Feedback

AUTOSTAR SUITE USER FEEDBACK

Last updated: 26 April 2005

This page is for user comments and information specific to the Meade Autostar Suite. If you have any comments, suggestions, questions or answers to questions posed here, e-mail them to me and I'll post them. Please use an appropriate Subject Line on your message. Thanks. (The Lunar Planetary Imager, LPI, is covered in the Helpful Information - Astrophotography area.)

Subject:	re: AutoStar Suite Anomaly
Sent:	Friday, April 22, 2005 22:57:51
From:	Richard Seymour (rseymour@wolfenet.com)
(bringing new meaning to the term "gray skies" :)

AH!  Got it... under Starmap / Magnitudes, turn ON the checkmark
for "Auto Contrast"

With that off, you get a grey sky (show every star as a dot)
With that ON, the system scales the "presence" of each star with
its magnitude... so stars below 5th magnitude kind'a disappear
(in a wide-angle view)

have fun
--dick

Subject:	AutoStar Suite Anomaly
Sent:	Tuesday, April 19, 2005 06:43:10
From:	Mike Hogan (mhogansr@comcast.net)
Every time I start AutoStar Suite on my laptop (WinXP), the Starmap has
so many star-like points on it that the screen is just a blur.  If I
cycle the Deep Sky button on the Toolbar (the one that looks like an
"eyeball") everything clears up and the display is normal.  I've
reinstalled the Suite twice, along with the 12/20/04 update, with no
change.  This is not really a big problem, just a bit of annoyance and
piques my curiosity as to whether it's hardware or software related.

I've spoken to one other user that has the same problem, but haven't
seen anything on your site about it.  Has anyone else experienced this?
I don't want to waste my time trying to talk to Meade about it, they've
been less than helpful so far on everything else.  I've been waiting 2
1/2 months for them to replace the LNT module for my new PE scope.  They
should just record the message "some time next week" on their customer
service answering machine.

As always, thanks for an interesting and informative site.

Mike

Mike here: Not certain what you mean by a "blur" but have you trying changing the zoom level?

And:

With a 60 deg FOV the points are so close together the display is sort
of gray.  Zooming in will eventually resolve them into thousands of
individual points of about single pixel size.  Clicking the Deep Sky
button makes them disappear, even though Deep Sky objects are turned off
in the Options>Starmap dialog box.

Clicking on one of the points indicates it is an SAO object but all
options are turned off except stars and planets.  If it is an SAO star,
why does it disappear when Deep Sky button is pushed?

To the best of my recollection, this started when the 12/20/04 update
was installed.  As I said, not a real problem, just curious.

Regards,
Mike

Subject:	LX 90 and autosuite
Sent:	Tuesday, April 12, 2005 11:11:28
From:	Paul (pauljonclarke@btopenworld.com)
Having trouble with connecting lx90 to computer. Trying to connect
through serial port. Keep getting the message invalid ack response from
lx200gps. Can you please help.

Best Regards Paul Clarke

Mike here: Lets back up a step or two. Does the Autostar Updater application communicate with the Autostar? If not, check for port conflicts (like from fax software). If so, then you know that the serial communications is working. If the comm is OK and only the Autostar Suite software doesn't work, then I would check that you have the latest version from Meade's site and that you have read their Autostar troubleshooting page.

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