1st Light with new system.......Wow

[Luna-tic]

Back in June, I bought a C6 and an Orion Astroview mount. Nice basic setup and I enjoyed several nights stargazing, but it was a constant battle to keep the image in the FOV, even after a meticulous alignment, and any type of photography, I could see, was going to be too much of a challenge if the shutter speed was slower than 1/125 or so. I managed to get some really nice eclipse pix, though.

So, it's for sale, and I now have an Edge HD 8", with the AVX mount. Been waiting for a week for the skies to clear, and last night was perfect, the seeing was really good for this time of year in the mid-South US. I set up out by my barn, which gives me a great southern exposure and moderately good westward, a bit less so the rest of the way 'round, but Polaris is plenty high for a good alignment (I'm at 35* N Lat).

There's definitely a learning curve with the Nexstar controller, and my backwards-thinking had me moving the tube the wrong way every time to center an object during alignment, which made it take 3X as long. There also seemed to be a bit of learning for the Nexstar to do on it's first use; when I chose Arcturus as my first star, the tube skewed as far as Mizar before it stopped. I figured I'd done something wrong, so I shut off the system and reset the base position of the mount, and started over. Got as far as Mizar again. Then I figured out, the computer has NOTHING to base where it is on; I manually skewed to Arcturus and hit 'align'. Then chose Antares, it almost found Saturn instead, so I manually skewed to Antares and hit 'align'. I then used Mizar as a confirming 3rd star, and it landed right on it. Everything else last night that I chose was dead-center in the FOV when the tube quit moving.

Man, this beats setting circles and SWAG any day.

The Moon being a night out from full tended to wash out most of the dimmer stars, and looking at it without a filter was sort of like staring into an arc lamp through a toilet paper tube, but I was completely amazed how clear and sharp things were. I was using the 40mm Plossl that came with the OTA, but I have a Baader 2" visual back, 2" dielectric diagonal and 2" Luminous 2.5X barlow and just got a 13mm Ultima, so I tried them all in combination, and quickly decided this setup was worth every penny, even though I sort of need to sell the other system to help pay for it.  After looking at the Moon for a while, I rested my eyes  to get my night vision back, and dialed up Saturn, which at 10pm isn't but  50-ish degrees away from the Moon, so the background was fairly bright, but At 385X (13mm/2.5X), it was clear and sharp; Cassini division easily seen, planetary shadow on the rings, color bands and at least four moons visible.

I surfed around a bit looked at a few doubles, then back at the moon for an encore, before closing up around midnight. Saturn by then was below the trees.  Took me several trips to haul everything the 100 yards back to the house, that'll get old, but I have a plan.

I built a wheeled carry-all for my other system, I'll do the same for this one, but instead of having its own wheels, I'm making it in two separate boxes that will clamp together and can be wheeled around with a small collapsible hand truck. The tripod I'll just hand-tote, but one box will hold the OTA, the other carries the mount, controls and extras. I have a hard case for all the eyepieces and accessories. I'm looking forward to getting more familiar with Nexstar, and doing some imaging later this Fall and winter, and growing old (er) with this system.

[cloudsweeper]

Sounds like you're getting results and enjoying it all!

The Celestron GoTo doesn't take long to get used to, and usually puts your target pretty much spot on.  (I nearly always use the two-star alignment - two chosen stars, that is.  Works a treat!)

Doug.

[Stargazer33]

Once you've programmed in the date and time (+/- daylight savings time), northern or southern hemisphere, lat and long and elevation above sea level into your handset it should be reasonably close to your target. In the same ball park at least.