Help with Nextstar Sky Align

[Mary Carla]

My daughter and I have been trying for month’s time get the 3 star alignment to work. Right now we are on Fripp Island, SC near Beaufort, SC. 
We followed all of the directions and got the alignment matched. When we told the telescope to point to Jupiter, it went to the opposite side of the sky. 
Things we did(not necessarily in this order)

1. Time Zone: -4

2. Long: -80 28’ 26” Lat: 32 19’ 05”

we also tried the city database and used Beaufort.

3. NW of equator

4. Time and date

I just can’t figure out what we are doing wrong. This is the second or third time we have gotten the successful match and it always goes to the wrong part of the sky. Usually, we get a match failed message. 
Please help!!!

[PeterCPC]

Does this help?

Peter

[Mick H]

Hi and welcome to SGL.

Are you using SkyPortal/SkySafari with mobile or tablet, or the hand control with Nexstar?

If the later try a two star align.

Exact time and date, and remember date is month/day/year so 07/23/2020

 

[Mick H]

5 hours ago, Mary Carla said:

2. Long: -80 28’ 26” Lat: 32 19’ 05”

Hang on:

When entering your location the lat/long you must include a leading “zero” ie. 80 deg is entered as 080. 

You must have 7 numbers in the long and 6 in the latitude entry.

You can check your entries by selecting “View time site” in the menu.

[Cosmic Geoff]

The latitude and longitude, so far as I recollect, should be in degrees and minutes (seconds) W and then degrees and minutes (seconds) N, with any leading zeroes entered.  It's safer to use the nearest city for now. Since the mount offers a nearest city option you can judge that the setting is not critical, but it is preferable to use an exact value.  Everything has to be entered in the correct format and right values otherwise the alignment will fail.  I assume you are on daylight saving time.

The Skyalign is intended for novices who cannot identify two or three bright alignment stars.  It will work with any three bright objects, but if they are not bright enough to be on the alignment list, the alignment will fail. If you can locate and name two bright stars, (e.g. Vega and Arcturus) then use the two-star auto align. (generally thought to be an equally accurate method).

Note that you can align on one named star ((one star align), but this will not be accurate unless the mount is perfectly levelled with a spirit level (not the bubble level built into the mount).  You can also use Solar System Align and align the mount on a planet, e.g. Jupiter.

I hope this helps. The Nexstar alt-azimuth GoTo is one of the more straightforward systems to use once you have learnt the sequence of operations (doing exactly what it says in the manual and on the screen.)