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ALL THE GEAR NO IDEA

adamw

By adamw
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adamw

adamw

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I am off to to the peak district tonight to try and set up the mount and try out the scope.I have charged up the powertank and hopefully there will be clear dark skies.I set it up in the garden last night but did not connect it to the power (see attached pic).I will let you know how I go on.

post-25330-0-42506400-1344526372_thumb.j

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adamw

adamw

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Hi

Just to let you know how I got on Thursday evening.I went to Surprise View near Hathersage which seems a very good spot apart from the amount of midges at dusk and the surprising amount of cars pulling onto the car part in the middle of the night with full beam on :mad: . I got there around 8pm set everything up and waited for it to start going dark so that I could find polaris and align the mount. Once I had found it I just positioned it in the centre of the polar scope for now as this was my first attempt. I then went through the setup procedure and did a 2 star set up. But with some difficulty, I couldn’t believe the amount of tiny stars that appeared as I turned the focuser.

By now it was around 11 pm with very clear skies. I put in M13 and pressed enter and when it had finished slewing I looked through the ascension 12.5mm ep which is one of the only three I have as of yet (others are ascension 7.5mm and baader 5mm ortho).When I looked through the ep it had found something that looked like a fluffy cloud and when I focused I could see a small cluster of stars I changed to the 7.5mm EP and it became bigger although nowhere near filling the FOV.I think it had found the correct object and it looked quite impressive. I then put in M57 it found nothing. Looking back I think I put the negative longitude figure in the synscan as East instead of West and I am not exactly sure if I was aligning to the stars I put in the handset, I used an app on my wife’s ipad to help. Not sure if it was that I had not polar aligned correctly, entered the latitude longitude position incorrectly, had centred to the wrong 2 stars or an accumulation of all 3.

At around midnight the moon was coming up so I put it in the handset pressed enter and it slewed round to a position I would say was the moon diameter to the left. I re positioned using the arrows on the handset and went through the different EP’s. It was a third quarter moon and I could see lots of detail along the vertical shadowy edge but I could not focus on the lh side of the moon, I think it was too bright and I need a moon filter.I was very impressed with thelevel of detail I could see with the 5mm ep.I also have a 2” x2 barlow, but I forgot to try that.

Can't wait for the next clear night so that I can get in some more practise with the alignment and looking through the scope. :grin:

Adam

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cotterless45

cotterless45

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The alignment stars are not always the most obvious or easy to find.There's a printable sky chart on the web with them on.

Having Telrad charts already, I just highlighted them.

It's such a pity that the SW handbook is written so badly,

Nick.

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