vince1976

That pretty much echoes my results from the first time I tried to set up the GOTO last week (I'd just been slewing manually prior to that). It took me ages to find stars on the list that were actually viewable from my back yard and not obscured by fences, sheds, street light pollution or my house.

I was trying to track Mars at the time and simply couldn't get it to track for more than a few minutes without minor manual adjustment.

The 2nd time though I looked through the star list first and located the familiar sounding stars in stellarium. I knew I always had a decent view of Orion so decided Rigel or Betelgeuse would be an easy star to start with.

Regretably Polaris is hidden behind my house (that'll cause me issues later if I ever get an EQ mount) so I settled on either Castor or Pollux for the 2nd star as both are easily located from Orion.

Using two stars so close together did seem to leave the tracking slightly innaccurate so I then slewed to some planets (easiest of all to find in the eyepeice) and used the PAE option (Pointing Accuracy Enhancement - found in the Utility menu) to to re-centre them. This seemed to leave me with excellent tracking over the few hours I needed to observe and image.

Each time I inserted a higher powered eyepeice, barlow or webcam I re-centered using the slowest slew and then used PAE again to lock it at increased accuracy.

Another lesson learned is that there seems to be the tiniest bit of give in the motor gearing at the slowest slew meaning that it might take a second or two to respond to you telling it to move one way after you've just told it to move in the opposite direction.

If I centered the star/planet by moving the scope in a direction opposite to the motion of the celestial sphere then tracking was bad as the scope's motors would have to go through that small "dead zone" first. I solved this my simply ensuring I centered the object by manually tracking close to its direction of motion. This way the scope responds instantly to movement requests and thus held the alignment perfectly after I'd used the PAE option.

That's my experience of the two times so far I've done the alignment. After a few more clear nights practicing I'm sure it'll be second nature to me but for now suffice to say GOTO sadly doesn't work by magic but the 2nd time is a lot easier than the 1st time.

To give me something to do until the skies clear again, Intend to take a 360 degree panoramic photo of my back garden and import that as a stellarium landscape to make it easier for me to see what will be obscured from view. I have a lot of obscructions and light pollution leaving me a restricted window to observe in so I'm sure this will prove a valuable use of my time.

Oh and as got the location co-ordinates, I used the excellent Android app GPS Status, which serves both to give accurate location coordinates and as a handy compass.