View Single Post
  #894  
Old 19-09-2009, 09:30 PM
tommycc78's Avatar
tommycc78 (Tom)
Tom

tommycc78 is offline
 
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Ipswich, Australia
Posts: 5
Assistance please!

G'day everyone,

I'm having a spot of bother with my brand new Celestron Advanced GT C8-S, and in particular getting my alignment to work.

I've noted an excellent article by Trevor Hand on setting up an equitorial mount here on Ice-in-Space, but to not avail... what am I doing wrong?

Here's the issue:
1. I'm pointing the mount south-centric per Trevor's instructions, and have assumed a correction angle of 11 degrees east of south for my location (Blackwater, Central Queensland near tropic of Capricorn).

2. The minimum latitude I seem to be able to dial up on the scope is approx 26 degrees, despite my location being 23 degrees South, which is making the slew slightly out of kilter with the true track of the night sky.

3. Using a 2-star align, I still note that a tour of the night sky - particularly double stars which should be easy to identify - does not align at all (nothing in the finder scope or in the vicinity after doing a scan of the reason around there).

4. I had a little more success with a solar-system align using Jupiter, but still didn't align with other objects in the sky. Granted at this time of day a lot of the stars in the region are unfamiliar to me (Alpha Centuri and a few of the more recognisable night sky objects have now disappeared behind my neighbours roof some hours ago)




Any suggestions? Any assistance you could afford would be most sincerely appreciated, as this scope is my pride-and-joy, but would be even better if I can get it to work properly (most probably operator error methinks)!

Cheers and thanks in advance for any help you can offer!
Tom
Reply With Quote