Telescope slewing in the wrong direction

[mikepacitti]

Hi all a newbie here, my son got a Meade starnavigator 102 from Santa, i aligned it to the 2 star method and put in Edinburgh as my nearest city, tonight we had a look at the sky and we saw the crescent moon ok and i think we saw Jupiter, but when we use the autostar it was well off direction when we entered the moon, any help would be appreciated. We are in Aberdeen , Scotland if that helps.

Thanks in advance,

Mike, Aberdeen.

[Slangers]

I'm guessing that your original alignment may be incorrect. Did you use 2 really obvious stars that you are familiar with? My experience with meade autostar is that it is usually fairly good, but only if you get it right from the beginning. You need to start with the scope pointing north (as accurately as you can) and absolutely level. Then do the 2 star align on things you are 100% sure of (maybe Rigel at the top of Orion and Vega). Have you got the date and time properly entered. Some of these goto scope hand controls have the date in US format MM-DD-YY just to confuse you. If that doesn't work, you have a problem.

[mikepacitti]

thanks for your reply, i guess its the american thing, we just tried a quick alignment as we didn't really know anything about stars etc, can i reset it to factory defaults and start again, we are totally new to this so we just went with what the scope said.

[Ibbo!]

make sure it knows which hemisphere its in and you have

the date entered in the correct format

If its got GPS ignore what I've said

[michael8554]

As Slangers said, the time is important. If in any doubt about BST and GMT, select GMT in the menus and look up the GMT time on the internet.

But as you say you're using Autostar to slew to the moon, this suggests you had an "Alignment Successful" message?

In which case something else is to blame for the innacuracy, such as loose clutches on the axes, or using too much magnification - Autostar should get you in the ballpark with a long focal length eyepiece.

Does it find Jupiter but is out on the moon?

Cheers

Michael

[ronin]

Guessing it is the location that is the problem.

The Meade needs to start up level and north, as accurately as possible, then it should pick the 2 alignment stars itself. You don't select them, just centre whatever the scope decides on.

The time is obvious, and the date is also as it's 08-Jan-2011. So that cannot easily be wrong.

Check that the time zone is 00:0, think it is actually -00:0.

DST is OFF.

The moon although big doesn't move similar to the stars and planets. Different rate, different position and not in the ecliptic. So I am not overly surprised that the scope was no where near.

An Autostar isn't exactly a PC with a powerful processor, memory and harddrive. I would almost guess that the moon alone with it's orbit would take up all resources and possibly more then an Autostar could support if accuracy was required for all dates. I would guess that the algorithm is fairly simple and it puts you in the right area.

There is a reset option.

Another thing is to enter your own location under setup, location add.

[mikepacitti]

Thanks for the replies, i think it was the location the very first time i switched it on and initialized it. I have put in Edinburgh as a new site and it seems to be slewing in the direction of Jupiter, it has been cloudy so i haven't been outside with it so next clear night i will go out and have another go.