I love to image dark nebula, you cant see them with the finderscope at all and only under pristiene skies can you decern the lack of stars where you think it may be with the full aperature of the 254 newt.
So i utilise the high accuracy of my goto to land me inthe right spot even with a 254mm mirror and a CCD it still requires a 20-60 second sub image just to figure out the outlay of the whole thing followed by a full length exposure to make sure i have the whole thing framed properly!
Though do remember i have polar aligned my mount to a high accuracy followed by syncing on stars to form a triangle around the object in question this generally lands me directly in the center ready to go.
As for eye balling it, all i can say is good luck.
Brendan
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