Yes I was beening impatient but I had good reasons....honest
. I usually start setting up at about 4.30pm if I want to take pics so I can take my sweet time and get everything spot on. On this particular day I got home late but worse still had had an inspiration during the day which I just could not wait to try out. Biggest problem was I changed configuration from a side by side 2 scope setup to a single scope setup with an off axis guider so none of my index marks I use for balancing the rig were correct. This meant stuffing around and moving the scope in the saddle to get the dec balance right. I was getting cranky as time was being wasted with a few false starts and my best alignment stars for alignmaster (a polar aligning program) were about to become useless. I just got careless in the mad stupid rush and did not secure the scope in the saddle properly after yet another move. Out it came and landed with a thump firstly on the starbook and then the ground. When setup on my pier with the vixen half pier the scope sits about 7 ft above the ground (good to get over the nieghbours shrubs along the fence line) but it's a long way down.
The starbook is basically a computer which runs the goto functions on vixen mounts. It has a large screen because the controller has a built in planetarium which once aligned shows the area of the sky where the scope is pointing. It does a whole lot of other things as well, bit like having starry night in the palm of your hand.I added a couple of small pics so you can see what it looks like.
Mark