I blame the heat I do!

[Knighty2112]

Got a new (to me anyway) Celestron AVX EQ Mount and a Starsense camera from Ade Ashford yesterday (a long 7 hour round trip but worth it hopefully), so couldn’t believe my luck that the forcast for the night was for clear skies! Hoorah! So after 7pm I put the new mount out, aligned it the best I could do Northwards with my iPhone compass, levelled the mount and set the azimuth screw to as close as 53 degrees as I could get it. Then I fitted and balanced my C8 SCT, which sat nicely up. I had set the mount a little too high, but could just manage to see the EP in the worst position of the mount so left it as it was. Next time I need to make sure it is a little lower down. I was also running along side it my other GoTo mount, my Celestron 8Se goto with a small Opticstar AR90 refractor on. 

So first up I put my solar filter on the front of my SCT and did a solar alignment on the sun. Did the same also with my small ‘frac which had my Lunt wedge installed. Alignment complete on both scopes, I then slewed across to Venus, and after taking out the filters in my Lunt wedge (but leaving the wedge diagonal in) I could see Venus just in the 10 o’clock position. Took the solar filter off the font of my SCT and no sign of Venus. 1 - nil to the 8 SE GoTo mount. Moved the new AVX EQ Mount around a little to try to find Venus, and boy did I forget how horrible it is to move an EQ Mount around (even motorised ones) when searching for things! Blahhhh! Anyhoo, the short of it was I couldn’t find Venus in th SCT for now (I managed later on though). So far I’m still finding my 8 SE GoTo mount much easier to set up, get going and find things with. A little later on I slewed the 8 SE got Mount round to see Saturn, which again fell into view in the EP pretty easily. 

So thinking most likely I’m not aligned very well on the pole star with my compass on the new mount, I had to wait until much later to fine tune it when Ploaris became observable, which was just gone 11pm (I had managed an hour earlier to finally get Venus in view with the SCT). Looking though the polar alignment hole in the scope I could see I was off Polaris by about 3 or 4 degress to the west of it, so did the RA adjustment screw adjustment Ok, and managed to get Polaris bang in the middle of th hole. OK, at this point it was now time for the Starsence to come into play and wow me. I fitted it to the mount, changed the hand controller, switched on the mount and pressed for the alignment to start. The scope dully started to move around the sky doing its alignment process. Sitting down in my chair in the garden I expected it to take at most about 4 or 5 mins tops. 10 mins later it was still slewing about? So I stopped the process and made sure the time and date etc where all correct. I set Leeds as the nearest location to me (need to put the correct figures in for where I live soon), and ran the alignment again. Still the same! Still looking around the sky for ages. Starting to think I had a dud here I then realised to my embarrassment that I had failed to take off the black cap in front of the starsense camera! (D’oh!) 

Anyhoo, that’s why I am blaming the heat (as per my title), which seems to have fried my brain today! 

After that the alignment did finish in a few minutes successfully, and for most targets looked at last night they where very well located in the EP. The only ones that failed for some reason where Mars and Neptune? With a little more practice I’m sure I’ll iron out what the problem was there. I just need to remember to take the damn Starsense cap off in future though! Lol!  

Final score for the night was a 1 - 1 draw so far between the two goto mounts. Pretty sure once I get to full grips with the new mount that it’ll do better than that score though! Fingers crossed!