Slew Help

Slew Help

Manually slewing the scope is performed from the Slew tab. There are 3 methods for slewing; with the slew buttons on the "front" side of the Slew tab, with drag gestures (called Gslew) on the "back" side, and with Tip Slew, which slews the scope according to the tip and tilt of the device. The tab is flipped between Slew (front) and Gslew (back) with the Slew/Gslew button in the upper right of the tab. Tip Slew is toggled on/off with a 2-finger long press on the Gslew gesture box. Slew speed is controlled by the multi-segment control below the slew area. In addition, switches to reverse slew direction vertically and horizontally are at the bottom of the tab.

Slew Buttons

In the upper portion of the tab, 4 directional buttons provide slew control for up, down, left and right. Pressing a button begins the slew, and releasing the button ends the slew. Centered between these is a Stop button to trigger an emergency stop in the case of a runaway slew. Although rare, because of the slow processor and communications in the LX200 scopes, it is possible the scope could miss an "end slew" command from SB. Always be alert to this possibility.

Slew Speed Control

Below the slew buttons is a 9 segment control for changing slew speed. Pressing one of the segment buttons changes the scope's slew speed to the number on the button, which corresponds to the same numeric speed set by the Slew Speed hot button (Key 1) on the real Autostar II. There are no scope commands to allow SB to determine the current scope slew speed, so under certain conditions, such as dropped communications link or scope restart, the selected Slew Speed button may not correspond to the actual scope speed. Pressing a speed button will reestablish the correspondence.

Horizontal and Vertical Slew Reverse Switches

Two switches at the bottom of the tab provide the ability to reverse slew directions for the appropriate buttons. The switch on the left reverses direction for left and right slews. For H-Direct, left slews left and right slews right. For H-Rev left slews right and right slews left. The switch on the right reverses direction for up and down slews. For V-Direct, up slews up and down slews down. For V-Rev, up slews down and down slews up. These reverse switches can be useful for improving convenience when slewing with different optical systems - finders, diagonals, etc.

Real Time Coordinate Display

In the upper left corner of the tab is a small, two-line display that updates current scope coordinates. Pressing the display will toggle between RA/Dec and Alt/Az coordinates. The additional load on the scope when outputting frequent coordinate updates can interfere with slew commands, making them sluggish or erratic. Therefore, this live update can be set to default to on or off in Preferences. In addition, they can be temporarily toggled off or on by tapping the Manual Slew title at the top of the tab.

There are two additional slewing modes.

Gslew - Gesture slewing provides the ability to slew the scope with single finger drag gestures on the device screen.

Tip Slew - Tip Slew uses the iOS device's accelerometer to provide scope slewing based on the tip and tilt of the device.