Sitting here my toes are really quite frozen! The reason is another session outside with the telescope. Having lovely clear skies I decided that despite the cold it would be worth setting it up again and spending some time with it. It’s been a little while since my last attempt and I’ve learned a few useful things since then that made tonight easier. In automatic align once it has slewed to the vicintity of the star it simply...
I’d been thinking about buying a bigger scope for a while when I finally crasked and ordered it last Friday. It’s another Meade, this time an 8″ LX90. I oredered it through Telecsope House as they had a good price and the service they displayed was good. I asked them to dispatch it on Wednesday, with the aim being that next day delivery would fall on Thursday and I’d be home. Amazingly enough – it worked! They dispatched...
I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a new telescope for a while now, and on Friday I finally broke and ordered one. With luck it should be with me later this week....
While doing some research on telescopes I found that polar alignment gives better tracking. never having aligned my scope using this mounting technique I thought I’d give it a try last night. It was more fiddly than using the simple Alt/Azimuth mount, but once aligned correctly (took me 3 tries to get it aligned anywhere near correctly though) the tracking was much superior! Instead of stars drifting slowly out of sight they just sat there, hardly moving from...
Went out briefly last night and tried to align the scope, but for the first time ever it hit the stops! It doesn’t normally do that, but it did start me wondering if I had the scope in the correct “home” position. I did a search and found this site http://www.weasner.com/etx/autostar/as_home.html which describes how to set it up. The procedure described isn’t what I’ve been doing, so I’ll...
I finally got round to installing the AutoStar software on my new laptop. I did contemplate not instaling it and just using the old laptop for the telescope, but having seen a lot of reports of the software working much better on win XP, especially the all important imaging app for the LPI, I decided to give it a try. so far it was easy to do and the telescope is now using the latest software and has the latest...