Aramcheck

Some youtube video's recommend setting up the alignment of the polar scope reticule using a distant TV aerial or similar instead of viewing a star & fiddling around with allen keys at night. This seemed sensible to me, but when I look through the polar scope on our new "Sky-Watcher AZ-EQ6 GT Pro GEQ & Alt-Az Astronomy Mount" in the daytime, all I can see is the reticule illuminated against the red background (irrespective of the SunScan LED power setting). Is this right for this type of mount, or am I doing something wrong? So far we've only had chance to use the mount at night once, and though I managed to view & roughly position polaris on the magic circle, it was a literal pain in the neck... (In future I've decided to use a webcam for this task!) On a related matter - the instructions which came with the scope say to rotate the RA axis until the the 0 o'clock of the reticule is at the highest point in the polarscope FOV. This seems like it's rather subjective, so is there any way of rotating the reticule so that it's automatically in this position when the scope is in the home position? (I've worked around it by doing this in the daytime, with the polarscope at a more ergonomic orientation & then making a note of how much the RA needs to be rotated to achieve this... but it just seems a bit poor considering how well the mount is otherwise engineered.) Cheers Ivor

Hi Jonjoe, I'd suggest hooking up with the Leeds Astronomical Society. They hold public observation sessions at the New Inn in Eccup, where you can see different scopes up close. They also have regular meetings at the Quakers Meeting House, near The Eldon pub / Leeds Uni and there's plenty of friendly/knowledgeable folk there. (Next is on the 11th Sept) - see http://www.astronomyleeds.org.uk/index.php for more info. My wife and I started observing last year, with a 130mm Newt. on EQ2. Light pollution here is pretty bad as we're close to the airport and I found it a pretty steep learning curve. We've just upgraded to a 200mm/EQ6... which on our first viewing enabled us to see much fainter objects like M57 & M13, both of which had previously eluded us under the similar conditions (probably from the difficulty of locating objects via star-hopping rather than light pollution?). Over the last year, I've found that just sitting out with binoculars and a copy of Sky & Telescope's "Pocket Sky Atlas" was an easier method of learning where things are in the sky. Cheers Ivor

Saw Prof. Brad Gibson (Hull University) give a fantastic talk at LAS earlier in the year... See image for event details.