Hi Eric,
Ahhhhh yeah, I have had my goto HEQ5 for well over a year now and guess what I did on the 3rd Jan 2012......?
Entered the date in as 03/01/2012 which of course meant that the goto thought I was in the March 1st Sky and I had EXACTLY the same issue, most of my goto jumps were three or four fields of view short as the "sky" was 2 months later in time.....good way to time travel but crap for finding stuff....took me 2 hours of realigning before I realised what the issue was.....DOH!
Also, make sure that you also get an ACCURATE clock to enter the time into the handset....near enough just introduces more error. I use a GPS app on my phone to enter the coords and accurate time. Make sure that you set the UT offset to +10 if you are in eastern states and that the daylight saving is ON (as it is right now).
The you shouldnt have too many issues. Make sure that when you do your star alignment, have say a 10mm eyepiece in the focuser and centre the SCOPE on the star, press enter and make sure the FINDERSCOPE is aligned on that first star also.
You get MUCH better goto pointing accuracy if you use a 100x mag eyepiece or so to centre the stars because when you then say put in a 25mm or other wider field EP, you can easily pick up the object as it should be smack dab in the middle of the field or near enough to identify easily which way you need to fine tune things.
Give it a burl, try to think, "date.....hmmmm its February 14th".....rather than the 14th Feb when you enter the date....saves you grief.
Dont feel bad, I have probably got this wrong at least 4 times now....
Oh yeah, also, DONT select Alpha Centauri from the handset and then fine tune the scope to Alpha Crucis (bottom of the Southern Cross)....there is another gem that I often stuff up and then scratch my head later and go DOH!
(by the way, Alpha Crucis or Acrux as it is listed in the database is an excellent alignment star as it is an optical double and you can easily identify it in the scope like an old friend when you see the two pretty stars in the finder/scope)
Cheers
Chris
. Once I did and entered UT+9 ( for SA) it was all fine, although because I used the finderscope to star align, the degree of acuracy wasn't fantastic (but good enough to make me forget the frustration experienced the previous nights...).
. At least I was still able to move it onto a target manually.
