I have to admit I dont fully understand how it works. I just "reverse engineered" the values I got in EQMOD-Tool.
I put that in an excel sheet and used it for a year using kstarts to manually slew to the RA values.
I found It more handy to have an extra tool for this and this is my approach.
Basically you only need to calculate "24:00:00 - PolarisCurrentHourAngle + MountCurrentRA" and you get the final RA position
where Polaris has to be centered in the small circle. DEC is not taken into account.
IF I finish this and it works I will do some tests to get some typical alignment error values to compare to the other standart aligning methods.
--= human, without Windows™ =--
pls excuse my bad english!
@knro when I start indiserver on my RaspberryPi which is connected to the mount and I query
the property "indi_getprop -h rp 'EQMod Mount.TIME_UTC.UTC'" where does this time come from?
Is this the system time from the Raspberry or from the indi client that connects to the server?
--= human, without Windows™ =--
pls excuse my bad english!
@knro We can calculate this value using PolarisCurrentHourAngle from indi_gpsd driver. Adding just a single switch to eqmod_driver would slew to correct RA position for visual polar alignement. I believe it would be very useful.
I finally managed to reach my humble approach to retrieve the mounts status by querying this four indiserver properties:
RASTATUS.RARunning
RASTATUS.RAGoto
DESTATUS.DERunning
DESTATUS.DEGoto.
I also took a look at the indi api and the tutorial_client but that's way to much for my cognitive-low-beginner brain, I' stick to indi_setprop.
Yesterday I did a quick polaris alignment test with my app with just a cheap 180mm lens/Canon on my mount. There was definitely some inaccuracy between the DSLR and the prism rail but at the end the final Ekos Goto Alignment showed me an initial "target is within degrees of solution coordinates" of 3°53'47''. Then I tried some exposures up to 4 minutes without any major deviation in the stars which I think is quite good for an optical only polaris alignment. The 180mm lens is certainly not suitable for measuring deviation but it is the only optics I currently have until I can afford my desired newton
--= human, without Windows™ =--
pls excuse my bad english!