Back on the wagon after 20 years!

[DougQuaidHauser]

Hey people, brand new to the forum, greetings.

I finally have a telescope again after a 20 year break of being an online astronomer (God knows why it took so long to get another telescope?!).

I managed to get a good priced Celestron SLT 127 Maksutov (2016) on Ebay a couple of weeks back and last night was the first chance to actually get it out (Cloudy last few weeks). Anyway, for the life of me I could not get the Nexstar Alt-Az GOTO mount to align. I tried Skyalign, Auto two-star, and two-star align with no luck (Using Pollux, Rigel etc).  Im guessing maybe thinking back that I set it to daylight saving and that threw it off, or maybe the handset is lacking updates? After months of seeing the process done on Youtube stating how simple it is, I am feeling slightly low IQ now lol.

Either way in manual mode I still had great views of the Moon and Orion nebula first up. Any advice?

[Cosmic Geoff]

If you don't have the Nexstar or Nexstar+ user manual, I suggest that you download it and study it.  It should be easy to get the alignment to work, provided you enter the right data.  You will have to set the location, which may take a careful study of the instructions and the menu system.  Many people get the format wrong, so check that the Lat/Long location you have looked up is in the same format that the mount uses. (or set on the nearest city.) The same remarks apply to setting the date and time.  (24 hour clock, time zone =0, daylight saving =no) To check the mount is working, select one-star align and align it on a bright star.

Alternatively, select solar system align. If it does not offer you the options of using the Moon and Mars in the next few evenings, you have done something wrong.

Do NOT try upgrading the software.  This is not usually necessary, is a fiddly process, and can end in tears.

Finally you need to power it from a proper power supply, not 8x AA from Poundland.🙂

[DougQuaidHauser]

Hi Cosmic Geoff, thanks for the advice, I did not get a chance to get out for month after due mostly to weather, and then completely forgot what board I signed up to.

But I did buy a power supply, read the manual etc and got the hang of auto 2 star alignments in the end. Although I was guilty a couple of weeks ago of wasting an hour failing to align due to forgetting the yanks like to reverse the month and days, so instead of trying to align 11th July i told it that it was 7th November, cheers Celestron (Muppet).

Edited July 25, 2021 by DougQuaidHauser

[wookie1965]

A warm welcome to SGL from your title I thought you had joined the wrong forum and should be AA 😁

https://www.celestron.com/pages/manuals

As above download and study the manual you can always come back and get help.