First Light (with first scope)

[dmahon]

The only day I'm not in, the scope/mount from FLO arrives. Fortunately it's taken in by a neighbour. Of course, it's cloudy! I'd ordered some EPs and a diagonal from Astro buy&sell the previous week together with a power pack from Maplin. Anyway, I spent an hour putting everything together, calibrating the polar alignment and looking over it all. Then I put it away in the garage (equipment list in signature). After supper, I took a look outside and could see Jupiter! So I quickly got everything out, pointed it in roughly the right direction and slewed around to Jupiter. Excellent views (though not much magnification) and shouted at the wife to take a look - by the time she came the clouds had moved and there wasn't a start to be seen anymore. I reluctantly put it all away again.

Undeterred, a few hours later when my wife was off to bed, I looked out again and found things had cleared up - so I got it all back out and set up for the second time. This time I did a rough polar alignment and tried to align the GoTo (2 star alignment). When I slewed around to Jupiter, it was miles off. I tried again a couple of times, and finally, on the fourth try, it worked out (I think that there are so many stars to see through the EP that I wasn't choosing the right ones) and I managed to automatically slew around to M31 and then Jupiter with GoTo. Whilst just looking around I even managed to get a satellite passing overhead. I took some captures with my SPC990.

I had 2 problems:

1) Alignment. I think a finder is going to help. I was considering a Telrad, but then saw how large they were (I have a small scope). A Rigel Quickfinder also looks to stand very tall. I'll probably get a cheap RDF.

2) Polar alignment. I could hardly see anything through my polar scope, so I am sure it was way off. Am I doing something wrong? Should I have a good view? Does it need a lot of focus?

Anyway, here is a picture I managed to take of Jupiter (only about 100 frames):