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Just a follow-up post. I received my 'plugable' serial to USB cable today and set about interfacing the mount to Stellarium. I had the mount facing south and alt at 35º using mobile phone apps. Plugging in the cable to the win10 laptop triggered a driver download. The cable set itself to com3 and I set the virtual port to com2. Reticle showed up in stellarium almost bang on scp. I slewed around to a few daytime stars and it worked flawless. I tried a 'two star align' and it came up with sao stars (this is using the virtual handset program on the laptop). The handset on the mount gives me actual star names to aim at. I guess I will have to make a handy list of prominent stars and their sao catalog numbers. It all adds to the learning I guess. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the next clear night to test it all out. It is raining at the moment with raging bushfires burning in the north. I hope the Stockport Observatory remains unaffected. A couple of nights ago I had a good night looking at the moon and trying out all my eyepieces in the Celestron kit. They all looked pretty nice to me, but the eye relief is pretty short in the smaller EP's. I'm happy with it as a startup kit though.
At around 4 am I got hit with dew, so I packed it in for the night, and today, I have ordered a dew hood. Having a great time with my kit and hope we all get clear skies in the next few days. Cheers-Rob
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