Saturday, February 10, 2018

Delta T and UTC Data is expired. consider updating.

After several weeks of bad weather and travelling, I could finally take out my scope again. When I started ModelCreator for the 10Micron mount, I saw this message:

Searched around. Couldn't find anything. Asked on the 10Micron forum and got a quick answer - yei! Turns out this is something to be update every now and then.

First challenge: where to get the updater software from. Looked around. Turns out, it comes with the firmware updates! So, I downloaded the latest firmware update from the 10Micron forum site. When starting this, it installed and started the firmware updater where I could select to update the UTC / Earth rotation data:

Then, after clicking on "Edit" it tells me where to download the necessary files from:

http://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/tai-utc.dat and
http://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/finals.data

To import them, you have to select the second(!) file and it will ask you for the first. Once they are imported, click "Next >" on the screen above and data is sent to the mount. yei!

... I can think of at least 10 ways to make this easier with relatively little effort ...