Quote:
Originally Posted by Diamondskies
Hi there,
I've just been given a Celestron Nexstar 8SE by my gorgeous husband and I'm sooooo excited and raring to go!! I'd love to get any tips or advice from anyone with the same or similar scopes or just tips for a beginner in general. Can't wait for clear skies  |
I would make my first purchase a spirit level, then find an app that retrieves your gps coordinates.
If you find that you are not getting good alignment on this scope in a different part of the sky request something and then find it manually, perform a "3-star" alignment (replace an original star with a new star/object basically whatever it is you told the scope you want to see.
Next purchase: head to supercheap auto or similar and buy a car "jump start pack" with two cigarette lighter points on it, use one to run your scope so you can be miles away from your car/ power point with no problems a med/large one of these will run this scope all night every night for weeks, don't bother with batteries. the second power point can be used for dew control for example which I find I need with this scope. I use this site
http://dso-browser.com/
to plan my viewing nights alongside stellarium. filter to a magnitude you would like to attempt for example, sort list given by time of max altitude and then go down the list and pick off whatever takes you fancy...
any other questions about this scope send me a message/post up here.
P.S. if the scope tells you "Warning! OTA will collide with something!" (or something along those lines anyway) then believe it and abort slewing to that object, because it is not lying to you. Just trust me on this one...
Good luck, It will serve you well.