Cosmic Geoff

It looks like the tracking can be turned off. See MENU/TRACKING/MODE/Off, Alt-Az, EQ North, EQ South.

The instruction manual confirms this, and states that 'Off' is for terrestial viewing.

If you do not have the instruction manual, I recommend that you locate and download it.

Looking for objects of low surface brightness from an urban area is rather a waste of time.  I have seen galaxies, a few nebulae and planetaries from my suburban site, but they were all high surface brightness objects and I saw far more from rural Devon.

Interestingly, I tried EEVA with a smaller scope (102mm) from home and was astonished to find that it revealed as much as a scope twice the size used visually at a dark skies site.  It revealed the Crab nebula (M1) and M33, and the Veil nebula (just), none of which I have ever seen visually at all.

I don't know what's wrong, but even though the SLT is a rubbish imaging mount it should track well. I purposely tested mine and found it would keep an object in the low-power eyepiece field for literally hours.  I can see two possibilities: a mechanical fault, or you have not carried out the aligning procedure to completion.

It seems from your description that it it not tracking in azimuth. If this is a mechanical fault, then restraining or encouraging it with your hand may disclose the problem. (Note: the mount cannot normally be moved in azimuth by hand, while there is a slip clutch in altitude).  It may be that the mount is not tracking at all, which will cause objects to move out of field rapidly in a minute or two.  It is essential to complete the alignment procedure - with the handset you do the coarse align, then the fine align, finishing IIRC by pressing the ALIGN button, which should result in a message something like "Alignment Complete, Starpointer Off."

The handset may offer eqatorial alignment options, which you should not try to use.

Could you confirm that you are performing a GoTo star alignment? (On a Nexstar+ there will be Skyalign (IIRC), 2-star, 2-star auto 1-star and solar system align available.) If you complete the alignment properly, completing all the coarse/fine/accept steps, there is no reason why it should not track. The tracking speed can be set to siderial, lunar and solar in the menus.

I have a CPC800. You will not want to hear this, but you should have got a German equatorial and another C8 OTA (or other design of OTA) instead of trying to use the CPC800 on a wedge.  Wedges are okay for a permanently mounted SCT (witness their use in observatories like the one at the Open University) but not for one that is taken down at the end of each session. Forums have a number of accounts from people who have put a SCT on a wedge with great enthusiasm, then a year ot two later given up and changed to a German equatorial.

I also have a Starsense, used with a C8 SE.  It is great for speeding setup, but does not seem to be any more accurate in practice than a 2-star align with the basic Nexstar handset.  So far as I have been able to understand it, with an equatorial GoTo, so long as you have a rough polar alignment the GoTo should work okay (e.g. for visual use) but some image rotation deleterious to long exposure imaging will occur unless the mechanical pol;ar alignment is spot on.

I have tried deep sky imaging with my CPC800 SCT on short exposures, with poor results, and also with a 102mm f5 Startravel, which gives a wider field and delivers images with live stacking which are pleasing to me, at least.

If the original poster has settled on a particular telescope, we can suggest a GoTo mount for it.

A 127mm Mak would also be worth having. I don't intend to dispose of mine.  They have a long focal length, so good for planetary observation and double stars, not for widefield (a complement to the Startravel).

https://www.nipon-scope.com/lens-caps

I bought from them to replace a missing cap on my 10x50 binoculars.  They supply various sizes up to 123mm.

You'd need to tell us what scopes are offered with those mounts.

I have the Startravel 102.  It's quite well made for a budget scope, and the parts are metal rather than plastic.  I found it useful as a widefield scope, but mainly use it for EEVA imaging (q.v.).  If you want a scope for planetary viewing or for splitting double stars, buy something else.

19 minutes ago, Steve Clay said:

Constantly check the security of your front filter...I'm slightly paranoid about it.

With good reason. A home-assembled filter I thought was good came loose through the piston/air effect of fitting it on the end of the telescope tube, making a small gap at one edge which admitted unfiltered light. Fortunately I spotted something was wrong.

I have the C8 SE with Celestron's standard RDF, and I had no trouble aligning it.  Can you possibly post a photograph with the horizontal and vertical adjustment knobs of the RDF arrowed on it?

Be clear about what you want to do with the new outfit.  You could have another Newtonian, but a SCT of the same aperture while more expensive will be shorter, lighter and easier to mount.  If you did not have dew problems with your 6" Newt, a SCT should be fine with just a dew shield.

  Do you intend to do deep space imaging at any point? If you don't, you don't have to contend with the added bother of an equatorial mount: polar alignment, odd eyepiece positions, counterweights and meridian flip.  Note that SCTs with their 'slow' focal ratios are not well suited to deep space imaging, particularly for beginners. If you want to do the latter, a small refractor or small f5 Newtonian would be much more suitable.

An alt-azimuth Goto will do fine for most use, including planetary imaging, but is not suited to the long exposures needed for deep space imaging.

You don't need to buy the scope and mount as a package, but this is usually cheaper than buying separately.

Give some thought to what GoTo system you want to invest in, as they aren't all the same.  The most often bought are the Celestron Nexstar and Sky-watcher Synscan, but there are others.  I have found the Nexstar (alt-azimuth version) easy to use and with some handy features, while the Synscan (equatorial version) is poorly designed and hard to align with sufficient accuracy for all-sky use.  Just look at the number of posts from newbies complaining that they can't make sense of Synscan, followed by the posts from experienced users who have found some workaround to get the thing to deliver a useful result.

How important is ease of setup to you? If you really want, you can have a setup with SCT + alt-az Goto + Starsense that you can carry out assembled and have going in a few minutes. If it's not a priority, you could spend the best part of an hour assembling a Newt + equatorial GoTo from its stored sub-assemblies, polar aligning it and sky aligning it.

You have to enter the data in the right format, and get the start position right (telescope on top, pointing to pole star, counterweight down).  When you start the alignment, the mount should slew approximately in the direction of the first alignment star.

And be reassured, it isn't just you, the Synscan software is badly designed and hard to use.

This would be a good outfit for planetary imaging.  For deep-space imaging I have found my cheap Startravel 102 f5 achro refractor to be much more useful than my C8.

You could leave off the C8 and put a camera or small refractor + camera on the CG-5 GT mount.

There is no need to change your scope if there is nothing wrong with it. Just change the mount.

I have the AZ-4 with steel legs and I like it as a quick to deploy mount.  I can get the mount set up and a telescope on it very quickly.  The AZ-4 is not a lightweight mount, but that means it will not tip over if a 5year old grabs hold of it.

Depends what you want to do.  The Startravel 102 is not really a general purpose scope -it is a wide field achromat that can manifest chromatic and other aberrations, and does not perform so well at high magnification.  I have one, and I use it mainly for EEVA (q.v.), not for visual observing.

By all means get a GoTo if you think it will suit your pattern of observing - you want to find faint objects, your skies are light polluted or you don't want to spend a lot of time 'learning the sky' or searching for objects.  Be aware that some GoTo systems are a lot easier to use than others.  I have the Nexstar GoTo with alt-azimuth mounts, which I found easy to learn and use - I got a result on my first evening with the Nexstar SLT.  I also have a Synscan equatorial GoTo and after several months I am losing patience with it - frankly I would not advise anyone to buy this system if they can find an alternative.

There has not been much innovation with GoTo systems of late, beyond periodic upgrades.  The most notable innovation has been in packaged plate-solving systems, eg Celestron's Starsense which can make your GoTo scope self-aligning.  The same technology is now available as a smartphone app sold with a range of beginner scopes.  You can also put together a plate-solving setup yourself, to confirm whether your telescope is pointing at the patch of sky you thought it was pointing at... 

If you want advice on what scope to buy you will get plenty advice here ... and then you will probably find it is out of stock because of the pandemic etc.

I have a EQ-5 Synscan and a lot of this sounds all too familiar.  The move to the first alignment star is based on the home position and dead-reckoning, so don't expect it to be accurate. Mine does align, sort of, but the accuracy on GoTo is usually low, sometimes  a degree or two out which is useless.  Sometimes it will point in the wrong direction altogether, or be wildly inaccurate on the other side of the meridian.

Apparently the mounts are capable of good accuracy but I am coming to think that the softwre is bad. I am tempted to sell the EQ-5 and buy an AVX.  Even if it isn't a great mount, at least I'll have better and more dependable software. 😕  I have had the Synscan for about 10 months and have spent more time trying to make it work usefully than anctually using it.

The 4 SE has the better mount, while the 6 SLT has more aperture.  The 4SE has a built-in flip mirror intended for imaging, and the mount can be tilted for use as an 'equatorial wedge' but neither of these outfits is suited for deep space imaging with long exposures.  For that you need a totally different mount and 'scope.

Both the 4SE and the 6 SLT would be suitable for general visual observing and planetary imaging - the latter NOT with a DSLR but with a dedicated planetary video camera. 

I no longer use the SLT tripod I got with my 127mm Mak SLT as I found it too wobbly.

There were deals offering the 6SLT for around the same price as a bare 6" SCT OTA!  There are other C6 SCT OTA/mount packages which cost a lot more than the 6 SLT.

3 hours ago, powerlord said:

Why do you say it's barely adequate for visual use ? And mount wise, its on an ali mount just now, not the 1.5" stainless.

I had a f5 203mm Newtonian on an eq-5 with the 1.75" stainless steel tripod.  That was adequate in a sheltered garden, but using it with a f6 Newt or in an exposed location would be pushing it.  The mount had some backlash with the RA electric drive I first had on it, and also with the Synscan GoTo upgrade kit I put on it later. The mount has a nominal capacity of 9KG (visual) which is what my Newtonian weighed.

It seems you have the aluminium Helios tripod, which by all accounts will not be adequate.

There are several motorising options, and the cheapest motor option is the RA-only variant.  The deluxe motor controllers are intended for use with guiding for imaging, I think.  But you will not be doing any guiding with that mount and scope - the combo is just barely adequate for visual use.

I would not bother transferring the mount on to the EQ-6 tripod, but it is up to you.

Re the max speed being x8, for major moves you are supposed to release the clutches and move the mount by hand. Unlike with a GoTo you are not losing anything by doing this. 

This could be a silly question, but has the RA clutch been tightened? If it is slack, the mount will probably not track.

Thanks, ASTAP looks useful.

Astronomy is not a cheap hobby (check some of the threads elsewhere on this forum) and sadly with many of the cheap scopes it is a case of 'pay peanuts, get rubbish'.  It is possible to buy decent scope outfits that don't break the bank, but you are likely to need some guidance to find them. For instance, we often recommend the Skywatcher Heritage 130mm reflector with mini-Dob table top mount.  The optics are good, it has a useful aperture, and the cost-saving is in the basic mount.  Sadly, almost anything we recommend will be out of stock because of the Covid epidemic and other problems. 

You could buy used, where there are bargains to be had, but you need to know something about astro equipment to avoid buying a dud. If you do see something, post a relevant link or image and we might be able to tell you whether to buy or avoid.

Thanks. Skychart looks useful.

Does anyone know of an online star atlas comparable to the now defunct calsky.com, which could produce maps of any scale, any RA/DEC, any magnitude limit and add solar system objects?

I have searched but cannot find anything comparable.

Calsky.com was taken down because of cost and other issues, it seems.