ATM using DSC for polar alignment...

["Benoit Schillings" <benoit@be.com>]

I was wondering of different ways I could use my digital setting 
circles to
speed up the polar alignment of my German Equatorial mount (MI-250)...

I have 20000 steps in RA and 8000 steps in DEC... pretty good accuracy
and I'm looking for ideas on algorithms which would tell me how far I 
am
in azimuth and elevation based on the pointing of a few stars around 
the sky.

Seems to me that this would be possible (and pretty accurate since I 
would use
4 or 5 stars therefore averaging the encoder limited resolution ).
 I just wonder if someone looked into that before diving back into
spherical trigonometry (yeak).


Another idea would be to see if it would be possible to itterate with a 
scheme like
point at arcturus, align on that... slew to polaris and offset in AZ/EL 
to center it and
repeat the process... seems to me that there could be some easy 
convergent method
like that. Any idea ?

                -- Benoit Schillings