Hi there George,
Sorry to hear you're having problems getting your mount aligned. Here are some suggestions which I hope are of use:
- If you're at a reasonably dark site, try using the polar scope to roughly align your mount to the pole. If you're not sure how to do this, there is an excellent video tutorial on YouTube which was done by Dion at the Astronomy Shed.
- Run the three star alignment routine in the Synscan hand controller and for the moment, ignore the fact that the first slew is not within the telescopes field of view.
- After you've completed the alignment routine on three stars, proceed to the polar alignment routine in the hand controller. When doing the polar alignment, try choosing a star which is close to the meridian. Depending on what time of night you're doing this, Sirius is a good choice around this time of year.
- If you're off the pole, the polar alignment routine will see this and prompt you to make the relevant corrections. After you've completed the polar alignment, power off the mount and repeat both the three star alignment and polar alignment once more, just to be sure.
You can effectively do a rough polar alignment right from the first alignment star by using the altitude and azimuth adjustments rather than the buttons on the hand controller to bring the first star into the telescopes field of view. To improve the accuracy of the alignment, I suggest using either a high-powered eyepiece or bringing the focus out a bit so as to enlarge the star and make it easier to position in the middle of the eyepiece/crosshair.
Once you've been through those steps, verify the accuracy of your alignment by using the goto routine to have the mount slew to a target. If it didn't help and you're still having problems, let us know.
Cheers
