Driveway & success with goto

by William K. Foster

Good news to report, I too had realized that the dec appeared to be backwards in some cases while playing around with the scope indoors yesterday. Armed with this, last night in my driveway, I tried again doing the single star alignment method.

To my surprise, it actually worked, I sent it to Deneb (sp?) and it was pretty close, I set the electronic clutch and fixed it up. Next, I sent it to Mizar and it was also on target.

Once I confirmed alignment, I got it to M80 and M81, pretty faint from my light polluted driveway, but still visible in the eyepiece without any touchup at around 200x, pretty good. Next I sent it off to M13, while it wasn't in the eyepiece, it was in the finder, so I was able to get it pretty easily. Finally, I sent it to M3, and again, it was in the finder, so I could fine tune to get it in the eyepiece without much trouble.

Additionally, I also got my Telrad working, the batteries weren't snug enough!

All-in-all, a pleasant success, after many nights of frustration.

Thanks for your help.

Posted on sf-bay-tac May 30, 2004 10:04:14 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.1 Jul 12, 2004 20:49:43 PT