Newbie - help appreciated!

[cosmological]

Hi and welcome to SGL.

I can see where you've gone wrong, don't use Polaris as an alignment star because it's too near the pole. When I was out last night with with my Goto scope, I just pointed it roughly north but relied on the 2 star alignment instead, but I used Deneb and Markab and that seemed to work, the goto was spot on.

[cosmological]

Just to add, the nearer towards the celestial equater and the further away from each other the 2 alignment stars are the better the goto will be.

[Astro Imp]

Hi and welcome from me too.

[JamesM]

Hi and welcome to the forum

Clear skies

James

[michigander]

Welcome to SGL, Flyboy!

Dana

[StuW]

Welcome flyboy. I'm just up the road from you in Leyland and a newbie with the skywatcher goto system myself. I managed to get approximate goto accuracy by just pointing roughly north, setting the angle of polaris on the mount and doing a 3 star align. As previously mentioned, i would avoid polaris as an alignment star.

Stu

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[Vofa]

Welcome Flyboy,

You should find somebody here has the answers for you. I have a Celestron Goto which I believe has similar features. Make sure your time/date/location inputs are spot on. It's very easy to make a wrong input which will confuse the hell out of the scope whatever alignment method you use. On my scope you use the finderscope to slew to your target at rate 9. I press ALIGN - then look through the eyepiece & move the target onto the very centre of the circle & press ENTER (the scope has automatically dropped to a much lower slewing speed enabling me to do this) I then move on to my next target etc. Are you able to do this?

[rickygoespop]

hello from me