[lcd1080 (Peter)]

Originally Posted by Clayton

... I think that you can go a lot further than your promising early effort if you practise & practise getting basics as good as you can ie focus, collomation, exposure. etc. And when great seeing comes along (hopefully sometime near opposition) You will reap the rewards

Thanks again Clayton, I guess we're all racing the clock with only 9 days left until opposition I have a motorized focuser that lets me adjust the focus in fine increments; that's helped me a lot and I know my collimation is good because I recently tested it. My biggest problem is keeping Jupiter centered within the camera's field of view when I use the 3x barlow. When I use no barlow at all Jupiter does not drift within the camera's 11 arcminute square field of view; however I have not been able to center Jupiter close enough to the middle of that square because when I insert the 3x barlow to image at F/30 Jupiter is usually too far off to one side of the field of view where it can neither be seen nor imaged. That means that I have to use the hand controller to manually bring Jupiter closer to the center where it can be seen through the 3x barlow. That is when the clock drive of my scope begins to fail and Jupiter drifts off the field of view. I use a reticle eyepiece for the alignment procedure however it's difficult to hit the "Align" button at the exact moment when the alignment star reaches the center of the crosshairs. I have one of the least expensive go-to mounts on the market so I may have to upgrade my mount. In the meantime I've gone to the rather extreme measure of experimenting with an autoguider to lock Jupiter in place at the center of my laptop screen. I'm attempting to use Jupiter itself as the autoguider's guide "star".