My first night with the AZEQ6-GT

[scitmon]

Having taken delivery of my Sky-Watcher AZEQ6 this week, I have had my first chance to use it tonight.  This is my first equatorial mount so as you can imagine I had a lot to get to grips with and I made so many newbie mistakes.  My first lesson is to not rely on my phones compass, it got north wrong by quite a bit.   Then came polar alignment... It took me a while to try and figure out why I could not see Polaris in my polar scope.  Mistake one was to not rotate my Dec axis 90 degrees, and my second was to not fully extend my counter weight bar which was also blocking the scope.  Polar scope calibration seemed to be good from the start thankfully.  Then I had to try and decipher the polar alignment instructions from the manual which wasn't explaining it very well and any online resource I tried was also not quite right as this mounts polar scope pattern seems to be quite a bit different to others.  Whenever I thought I got it right, the slew to the first alignment star was way off.  I think my mistake there was to not return the dec axis to home position after alignment.  Clearly more practice required!  

Once I had my first successful alignment, I started experimenting with exposure times with my canon 700d while targeting the eastern veil nebula.  I initially found stars started to trail at around 30 seconds which I was disappointed with.  My polar alignment was probably dreadful so I tried the polar alignment menu in the syn scan menus.  I found this very easy to use and I was impressed with the results after I did this.  I could now get 60 second exposures without any trailing.

Overall I am happy with my first use of the mount and looking forward to many more uses.