Try It Out!

Now that you’re fully configured and correctly connected to your mount, if you still have your serial port (or EQDIR) plugged in, unplug it, wait a couple of seconds and then reconnect it. You should see the red LED in the bottom left of the Main window turn yellow and the text box above it should say “Detecting mount...”.

If you now connect your serial port to the mount and power up the mount controller, after a few seconds the software should detect the mount and the yellow LED should turn green and report a status of “Idle”.

Generally speaking, you should be able to plug in your serial port, connect it to the mount, and power up the mount in any order. The software will auto-detect the mount in due course and the software will always reflect the current status with the coloured LED - let’s call it the connection LED. Depending on how you connected your mount, you may have gone straight to green since the detection phase is quite quick.

Once the software has detected your mount, you should notice that the RA/DEC and ALT/AZ fields are now filled with data on the current position of your mount. In fact, the software doesn’t have a clue what position the mount is in at the moment and will assume that it is in the HOME position (counter-weight bar down, scope pointing at the celestial pole). If your scope isn’t in the HOME position, then you should loosen the RA/DEC clutches and move it to the HOME position.