Nexstar GT Mount, Help!!

[Grant]

My mount came today and I've managed to mount my ST80 onto it (pictures to follow, slight hack but it works). I'm pretty certain that the way I've mounted the ST80 isn't what's causing me problems but I have no idea whats going on!

Basically, everytime I go to align the telescope slews so that if I let it continue it would just bash straight into the tripod, it's like the alignment is well off. I've made triple sure It's pointing North and is level (compass and level at the ready) but still no joy, I've tried choosing London as my nearest city and entering my longitude/latitude manually, I've made sure I'm entering the date in the MM/DD/YY format rather than the usual British way of doing it, I'm choosing the correct time (00:30 am) and also setting the time zone to 0 (that's us right?), I just don't get it! Especially as the ST80 is so much smaller than the 60mm thing that it came with, so if the ST80 hits that definitely would've too...

Am I missing something obvious here? It's driving me insane!! Help!

[geppetto]

Grant

I know nothing much about these things but just a guess

Is there a setting for southern/northern hemisphere in the setup menu

and might it be set to the wrong one?

[Grant]

You were almost right Philip, I gave up thinking it was a configuration error so took the whole thing to bits to see what was going on, everything was rosy so I put it all back together again, I was about to give up and go to bed when I stumbled across a website that listed known faults with the mount, one fault or tip to look out for was when setting the time zone, rather than GMT being 0 as you would expect it's actually 24 - Timezone, so for GMT you have to enter 24 (a bit weird...) also, the handset won't work correctly if you select the scope it's holding from the list, instead you have to enter custom values representing the scope you've got mounted plus, it doesn't remember the longitude and latitude you enter so it's best just to do it to the nearest city...

Anyway, after all that, took it outside using the battery pack rather than setting up an extension cable again, tried aligning it, first stop Vega, which was just about spot on in the center, next capella, again not far off center. To make sure it was working I told it to point at the moon which it promptly did (couldn't really miss it tonight!). I was going to dabble some more but of course, the batteries ran out...

I was tempting to set the extension cable up and carry on playing but to be honest with my earlier delay the moon is now so bright here theres little point. But, at least it's now working! Roll on tomorrow night and get lost clouds!

[GordonCopestake]

Mike Swansons nexstar site is a wealth of info on these mounts. He's a regular on Cloudy Nights too and can answer most questions.

http://www.nexstarsite.com/

[geppetto]

Phew :?

Pleased its now ok.

Hope tonight's clear so you can have a play

Gordon

That's a very good link to lots of info 8)