petek314

Hi I have the skywatcher 12 inch goto. I am not aware of any excess noise from motor gears etc when I push the scope round manually. if you have already solved the problem then great. Otherwise I will get my scope out and try and film the manual goto action. Not sure whether that will help. I am very pleased with the fact that I can manually goto an object and then when in close proximity I can send the scope on goto to centre the object. This prevents noise disturbing neighbours because the auto goto is of short duration and usually slow speed. The noise of the goto is not that loud but I am always conscious of being as quiet as possible in the middle of the night.

I was also out last night looking at Pythagoras and have to say thats a brilliant sketch you have made. The central peak and its shadow were most conspicuous. inspires me to start sketching myself!

Very true, its nice to see young people motivated to see the universe at first hand through a telescope.

I remember being out in the school yard being instructed to stand in certain positions to demonstrate the relative distances of each solar system planet from the Sun. The outer planets were several miles away which to an 8 year old was mind boggling. This and the space race at the time greatly influenced my interest in astronomy which is still strong 50 years on. Always nice to see young people being interested in astronomy.