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Hi, thanks for the welcome.
My 6" GSO arrived yesterday. I spent a couple of hours setting it up last night. I didn't realise just how big this thing is :-) The telescope and mount seem very well constructed and Andrews Comm. included more eyepieces than I expected. The instruction manual is beyond useless (GSO didn't even use a spell checker (ie. tesescope). It's very difficult to understand in parts and the EQ mount set up instructions miss a lot of crucial steps. I ended up referencing a Celestron instruction manual PDF off their website :-) Collimation was reasonably good but still off (no wonder, after a truck trip from Sydney to Adelaide).
I have never collimated a reflector before and some of the instruction pages on the internet go into mind blowing detail. Everyone seems to rave about laser collimators so I ordered one from Andrew's today. Hopefully it will make the job much easier.
Iceman is right about telescopes and astrophotography in general being a slippery slope in terms of money :-) I've already spent more on accessories than the telescope and mount. Trying astrophotography will wait for a week or so until everything is set up.
I tried out my telescope last night but Mars seemed to have a lot of chromatic aberration around it and a large dim star pattern (about a dozen points). Proper collimation will no doubt help there.
Last night was unusually windy in Adelaide and there's a forecast for rain and thunderstorms over the weekend. We need the rain, but the timing is a little unfortunate :-)
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